Interim Chief Transformation Officer — Integration

Not a programme office with a bigger title

Status reports, milestone tracking and a weekly steering meeting might look like the substance of this appointment. Those things may exist, but they are not the job. Nor is the job to launch new initiatives. The Interim Chief Transformation Officer is appointed to make choices, which in a transformation agenda usually means doing fewer things properly and stopping some altogether. Your first real win here could be closing something down, and the right candidate is comfortable defending that with evidence.

Making the choices planning keeps deferring

Annual planning is good at adding and poor at subtracting. Every initiative has a sponsor, a partial business case and a reason why stopping it now would waste what has already been spent. Over time a portfolio fills with overlapping work competing for the same engineers, the same change managers and the same customers' patience. Your work is to make the whole portfolio visible and then to choose.

You will hold the authority to do so. You will agree with the Group Chief Executive Officer how decisions are allocated and how much local leaders may approve without escalation, and decide the evidence that governs how money and people are used and where controls sit. Once each commitment's full cost is visible, you will choose which go on and which do not. You will refuse any proposal that strands cost or risk with nobody to answer for it, and investment cases with no analysis of adoption, dependencies and the downside. You will approve how issues climb and decide how often directors see progress, exceptions and unresolved choices. The skill at the centre of it is the reversible decision: acting on incomplete operating evidence where waiting costs more, then tightening the decision as the facts improve.

Someone who has simplified before

Your transformation work has been in businesses no smaller than $630 million in revenue, 1,200 people and five countries, and you have taken a business through a scale-up without letting the board's account diverge from what operations could show. The group will weigh your record in scale-up, professionalisation and succession. Strategy formation is wanted at level 4, and PMO governance, value case and change adoption at level 3. Succession matters more than it might seem: a portfolio that only one person can explain has not really been simplified. You can tell a chief executive what is still unsettled and keep the work moving regardless. You stop commitments without needing every country leader to agree, and you will carry the result for the full 12 months.

Twelve months to a focused portfolio

In the first ninety days, every transformation initiative should be listed with its full cost, owner and dependencies, and the criteria for portfolio choices agreed. By month nine, overlapping initiatives should have been consolidated or ended, and what remains sequenced around its critical dependencies. By month 12, the bank should have a focused, sequenced portfolio with clear owners, governed by a board cadence that carries on without you.

Our first conversation, in week 1, is held confidentially over video with the Group Chief Executive Officer. Week three is with the Risk Committee Chair, who will walk through with you how portfolio choices change the bank's risk profile. In week five comes an in-person session with leaders who run the bank's main functions, and week 7 a discussion with the board's directors. Within four working days of every stage you will have our comments in writing.