Advisory Director — Technology Value and Controls

A year measured in engineering hours

The easiest way to understand this seat is to start at the end. By month 12, engineering capacity should be visibly pointed at the priorities the leadership team has agreed, and the controls and escalation routes around technology should be ones the leadership can run without an adviser present. Getting there means two earlier markers. The first ninety days should give the Group Chief Executive Officer agreed advice on where engineering effort goes, with the evidence for each priority set out and accepted. Around month nine every inherited technology commitment should have received a recommendation, and value cases that left out adoption or the downside should have been challenged before they consumed more capacity.

Engineering capacity is the scarcest resource in most technology functions and the least visible to the people who allocate it. Hours drift towards whoever asks loudest, towards maintenance of systems nobody has decided to retire, and towards work that was urgent two planning cycles ago. Advice that changes this has to be grounded in how engineering time is actually spent, not how the plan says it is spent.

Counsel, and the weight it carries

The Advisory Director's authority is counsel. You will advise the Group Chief Executive Officer, to whom you report, and the decisions remain theirs. Within that, the brief is substantial. You will help agree who decides what about engineering capacity, including the limits local leaders work within. You will shape the evidence used to govern technology investment, capacity and control. You will advise which inherited technology commitments should carry on, be held or be closed. You will question any request for engineering time that parks its cost or exposure with a team that never accepted it, and any value case silent on its users, on the systems it leans on or on the price of failure. You will also counsel on how technology leadership is organised and how issues should escalate, and help the chief executive settle disputes with operating heads before engineering time is promised.

An adviser who has moved capacity before

Scale-up is where you learned this: you have moved decision rights, budgets and the operating rhythm in a business with revenue of $825 million or more, 2,300 people and a presence in four countries, and that is the experience most relevant to deciding where engineering capacity should stop serving old demand. More than once, data on how engineering hours were really spent has redirected people, money or management attention. Scale-up, digital transformation and professionalisation are the experiences the Group Chief Executive Officer will examine, together with risk judgement at level 4; for architecture at scale, product delivery, and data and AI governance the bar is level 3. You protect controls that are useful, expose the cost of exceptions, and leave a stronger bench behind you. Influence without accountability for the 12 months is not what is on offer, and an adviser who needs unanimous country-leader agreement before recommending a stop will find the work difficult.

Four sittings, ending with the board

Week one is a conversation by video, held in confidence, with the Group Chief Executive Officer about how you would read where engineering time is going today. The Board Chair follows in the third week, working through the detail with you. By week five you are in the room with an executive panel drawn from the functions whose demands on engineering your advice will reshape. The full board takes the final conversation in the seventh week. Each time, our assessment comes to you in writing within two working days.