Interim Group Chief Strategy Officer — Value Agenda

Twenty-four months, from promises to stop rules

A transformation portfolio without stop rules is a list of commitments that can only grow. The Interim Group Chief Strategy Officer's two years are about giving every programme a value case it can be held to, and an agreed point at which it ends if the case does not hold.

The first ninety days should lay that foundation: a value case and explicit stop rules agreed for every programme in the portfolio, written so that each trigger is a measurable fact rather than a matter of mood. Around month nine the rules should be biting. Some programmes should have gone ahead on evidence, some should have been paused, and at least one should have stopped, with the capacity it released moved to work that earns it. By month 24 the portfolio should be governed by value cases that have been tested in practice, and the stop rules should belong to operating leaders rather than to the strategy office.

The authority behind the stop rules

Stop rules mean nothing unless someone can enforce them, and in this role that someone is you. You will set how portfolio decisions are allocated, with clear limits on what market leaders may approve, and pick the measures that decide where capital and capacity go across the group's markets. You will decide which programmes go on and which do not. No proposal that pushes cost or risk onto others without an owner will get through you; nor will funding where adoption, dependencies or the bad case have not been addressed. You will also approve who leads each programme and how issues reach you, settling conflicts with the business before resources move. In a bank, where many programmes are partly regulatory and partly commercial, part of the judgement is telling a mandatory change from one that has borrowed regulatory language to protect itself.

A strategist who has answered for the money

Strategy or transformation leadership in an organisation of $820 million in revenue, 1,600 people and four countries, or larger, is the minimum we are looking for. Your experience of buy-side M&A, integration and digital transformation will be examined closely, because those are the three kinds of programme most likely to outlive their business case. The group wants strategy formation at level 4, and at level 3 PMO governance, value case discipline and change adoption. Change adoption deserves emphasis: a value case that assumes customers or staff will change behaviour on schedule is a hope, and a strong candidate knows how to test that assumption early.

Baselines you have set have stood up when a chief executive and the people running the work pushed back. You have declined to fund programmes whose sponsors could not say who would adopt them or what the downside was, and then built the capability to make better cases. Gaps that remain are named and acted on, never parked behind the word uncertainty. Unanimous country-leader consent is not your threshold for stopping a commitment, and you will stay accountable for the full 24 months.

Testing a stop decision before you make one

We start in week one with an off-the-record conversation by video with the Group Chief Executive Officer about the portfolio and what stop rules would mean in practice. In the third week the Board Chair will test how you would bring a stop decision to the board. Week five moves to an in-person meeting with executives who each lead a different function, several of whom would own programmes under your rules; week 7 brings the whole board. You will know how each stage went, in writing, inside two working days.