Interim Chief Transformation Officer — Scale

Sequencing is the strategy

Most transformation agendas fail on order rather than ambition. When every initiative is a priority, scarce people are spent on starting things, and the work that would unlock the rest waits behind work that merely looked urgent. The cost of poor sequencing compounds: each month spent on the wrong thing also delays whatever depended on the right one. The Interim Chief Transformation Officer is appointed to settle the choices and set the order, and holds executive authority to do both.

That authority is broad. You will define how portfolio decisions get made and how much business-unit managers may approve unaided, and you will decide which measures steer spending, capacity and control. Every inherited commitment gets a verdict from you, to proceed, to wait its turn or to end, and no proposal goes ahead while its cost or risk lands on nobody in particular. Investment cases that leave out adoption, operating dependencies or downside will not get past you. The workstream leadership and the route by which problems reach you need your approval; you will also referee disputes between the Investment Committee and the managers running operations, and decide the cadence of the board's reviews of progress, exceptions and decisions still pending.

The judgement the seat demands is mostly about what not to start. A transformation officer with real authority is tempted to prove it by launching things. The stronger move is usually to close two initiatives so that a third can be done properly, and then to put the disputed downside of that choice in front of the Investment Committee without softening it. Sequencing also means accepting that some good ideas will wait the whole year, and saying so early enough that their sponsors can plan around it.

Twelve months, three settled positions

Within ninety days, the portfolio choices should be settled with the Investment Committee and the sequence fixed, each workstream with a lead who answers for it. Around month nine, investment cases that cannot name their users, what they rest on and what failure would cost should have been declined and the people and money they would have used moved onto the agreed sequence. By month 12, the agenda should be running in that order, with progress, exceptions and open decisions reaching the board on a set rhythm.

The record, and how it will be tested

Your transformation work has spanned six countries, in organisations of 900 or more people with at least $420 million in revenue. You have carried a contested downside in front of an investment committee at full strength, and you have withheld money from work whose adopters and risks nobody would name, then rebuilt the capacity the work really needed. Selection will probe three parts of your history: buy-side M&A, professionalisation and succession. The capability bar is level 4 for strategy formation and level 3 for PMO governance, value case and change adoption. If ending a commitment would, for you, require every national head to agree first, or if you want the influence without twelve months of accountability, look elsewhere.

Selection runs over seven weeks. The Investment Committee opens it with a private call over video in the first week. A fortnight later the Board Chair uses week three to test how you would sequence a contested portfolio. Week five is a panel of executives, met in person, drawn from each function; the seventh week brings the final session with the full board. Answers on every stage arrive within two working days.