Interim Chief Transformation Officer — Deal and Integration Renewal

A thesis is a promise someone has to keep

Every transaction is justified by a thesis: a short account of why the combined business will be worth more than its parts. Integration is where that account meets reality, and operating continuity is the condition that keeps customers and colleagues from paying for the change. The three are often run by different teams on different timetables. Holding them together for 12 months is the job of the Interim Chief Transformation Officer, with the Group Chief Executive Officer as the reporting line.

Integration calls you will make

The seat carries executive authority. You will agree which integration decisions stay with local leaders and which come to you, and set the evidence that any request for integration money, people or control changes must bring. Commitments made before or during the deal survive only if you confirm them. You can refuse a proposal that pushes integration risk onto a team that never accepted it, and a synergy case that assumes customers and staff will simply adopt the new way, ignores what it depends on, or leaves the downside unpriced. You approve how the integration leadership is organised and how issues travel upward, settle disagreements between the Group Chief Executive Officer and the leaders running the combined operations, and decide how often the board hears about progress, deviations and calls still to be made.

Departures from the thesis, decided in the open

Integrations rarely follow the plan exactly, and that is not the problem. The problem is a departure nobody decided: a synergy quietly abandoned, a platform migration deferred without anyone asking what it did to the thesis. Good practice records each departure as a decision, with its consequence for value stated, so that the board is never surprised by the arithmetic at the end.

Month by month, in outline

Over the opening ninety days, the deal thesis should be turned into integration priorities and continuity safeguards, signed off by the Group Chief Executive Officer and assigned to accountable leaders. Around month nine, integration milestones should be tracked against the thesis, continuity risks reviewed as a standing item, and any departure from the thesis taken as an explicit decision. By month 12 the integration should be closed out with value evidenced against the thesis, operations uninterrupted and successors owning the combined operating model.

The transformation leader we need

Your experience lies in technology or digital platforms, in businesses that crossed $575 million in revenue and 1,000 people and operated in three countries or more. Buy-side M&A is the first experience the board weighs, with professionalisation and succession close behind, because a combined business needs documented ways of working and leaders ready to run them after you leave. Strategy formation at level 4 is the core capability; PMO governance, change adoption and value-case work are each expected at level 3. You have told a chief executive about a downside they disputed, without hedging, and you bring on the people who will run the combined business while the integration is still under way, so it does not need you once you leave.

From the chief executive's call to the boardroom

Week one is a first private talk by video with the Group Chief Executive Officer. Week three is spent with the Risk Committee Chair on continuity risk during integration. Week five is a face-to-face panel of executives who lead the company's functions, testing how practical your approach is, and week seven brings you before the directors together. We aim to reply in writing within 4 working days of each stage.