Advisory Director — Capital, Performance and Delivery

An adviser who has written hurdles before

Your finance decisions in energy or utility services have been ones where waiting had a price you could measure, in businesses with revenue of $310 million or more, 700 people and a reach across six countries. In earlier finance roles you established who truly bore the cost of an exception before approving its continuation, and you can lay out an open gap for a chief financial officer without using uncertainty as a reason to wait. The Group Chief Financial Officer will study your professionalisation, integration and crisis response work most closely. Capital allocation is wanted at level 4, and risk judgement, FP&A forecasting, and controls and reporting at level 3.

Crisis response matters more than it might seem. Investment hurdles are written in calm conditions and tested in difficult ones, and an adviser who has watched a capital plan meet a real disruption knows which assumptions break first.

What the advice will shape

The Advisory Director offers counsel; the Group Chief Financial Officer decides. The subject is investment hurdles, the tests a capital proposal must pass before money is committed, and specifically hurdles that bring delivery and control dependencies into view. In energy and utility services a project's value often rests on work owned by other teams and on controls that sit outside finance, and a hurdle that tests only the financial return can approve a project the organisation cannot deliver.

Your advice will help agree who decides what about investment and the limits local leaders work within. You will advise on the tests that capital requests, capacity calls and control changes must pass, recommend which inherited capital commitments should proceed, wait or be closed, and question any case whose cost or exposure would settle on a team without its consent. You will question value cases that leave out adoption, the work they depend on or what failure would cost. You will also counsel on how capital decisions are led and escalated, and help finance and the operating side reach agreement before capital is released.

Twenty-four months of hurdles in use

When the first ninety days are up, the Group Chief Financial Officer should have a draft set of investment hurdles that shows the delivery and control dependencies every case must name. Around month nine the hurdles should have been applied to the inherited capital commitments, with advice on which to take forward, hold or close put to finance leadership. By month 24 the hurdles should be embedded in capital approval, checked against actual delivery outcomes and owned by the finance team rather than by the adviser who helped write them. Counsel of this kind only earns trust if the adviser stays accountable for it across the full 24 months, and if they are willing to recommend stopping a commitment without unanimous agreement from country leaders.

Hurdles put to four audiences

The opening conversation is with the Group Chief Financial Officer, held privately on video at the very start, in the first week, about how you would design a hurdle that exposes delivery risk. The Board Chair works through the subject with you in week three. Executive leaders of the operating and support functions then meet you in person, as a panel, in week five, testing whether your hurdles are workable from their side, and the directors as a whole board conclude matters in the seventh week. Two working days after each stage, at most, you will have our written response.