Interim Transformation Executive — Value Delivery

Choosing what will not be funded

Every transformation portfolio holds more good ideas than the capacity to deliver them. The hard discipline is not choosing what to start; it is deciding which worthwhile initiatives will go without, and saying so early enough that the people involved can redirect their effort. The Interim Transformation Executive is appointed, reporting to the Board Strategy Committee, to make those choices with executive authority and to make them defensible.

You will set the thresholds that leave clear room for local leaders, and choose the yardstick against which every initiative bids for money and people across the four markets. Inherited initiatives keep their funding, lose it or wait, on your call. You can halt a proposal that loads its burden onto a team that never agreed to bear it, and decline one that is vague about who will take the change up, what it needs from elsewhere in the business, or how far it could fall short. The leadership structure needs your approval, as does the way contested calls rise, and when the committee and those running the business disagree, you settle it before anyone commits money or people.

In technology businesses, constrained capacity usually means product and engineering people: the scarcest resource and the slowest to redeploy well. A good funding decision therefore accounts not only for value but for what the released team will do next, and how quickly they can be productive there. Stopping work without a destination for its people simply moves the waste.

The person suited to this has led a geographic expansion whose effects ran from the boardroom to the delivery teams, in a technology or digital platforms business with no less than $440 million of revenue, 800 or more people and a presence in four countries or more. Platform pivots and succession are also weighed, since both are moments when a portfolio must be reshaped without stopping. Strategy formation at level 4 matters most; PMO governance, change adoption and value-case work follow, each at level 3. Your baselines have stood up to a board committee and to engineering leaders, and you have turned down funding for initiatives that could not name their users or their downside.

Two years of decisions that hold

The first ninety days establish the rules of the game: funding criteria, stop rules and capacity limits for transformation initiatives, agreed with the Board Strategy Committee before any individual initiative is judged. By around month nine every funded initiative should be ranked against the constrained capacity, the lower-ranked work paused or stopped, and the released people redeployed to work that matters more. By month 24 funding decisions should run on a settled cadence, value should be evidenced initiative by initiative, and stop rules should be applied without anyone needing to escalate them.

Four tests of a funding judgement

We begin early in week one with an introductory call by video, in confidence, with the Board Strategy Committee about how you would rank a crowded portfolio. A working session with the Audit Committee Chair follows in week three, probing whether your funding evidence would stand up to scrutiny. Week five is given to an in-person meeting with executives from the company's different functions, who will press on the human cost of stopping work; the seventh week brings you before the full board. Each stage gets a written reply from us within 3 working days.