Interim Chief Integration Officer — Delivery

Stop rules before start dates

Most transformation portfolios have clear launch criteria and almost no exit criteria. This interim appointment exists to reverse that, setting the value case and the stop rules for the portfolio with executive authority. In a regulated public-interest business, a programme that cannot be stopped is a programme that will eventually be justified by what has already been spent rather than by what it will return.

The reach of an integration officer's authority

You will draw up who decides what across the transformation portfolio, including the limits local leaders keep for themselves, and select the evidence that spending, capacity and control decisions must rest on. Each commitment then gets your ruling to proceed, pause or stop, and any plan that shifts cost or risk onto others with no one answerable for it is halted. Investment is held back when a value case cannot name the people who will work differently, the other programmes it leans on, or the damage if the benefit never arrives. Who leads, and how issues reach the committee, is yours to approve, and so is the resolution of any standoff between committee members and operating leaders, settled before budgets or teams are tied up.

Where integration programmes usually leak value

Rarely at the deal itself. More often in the months after, when benefits counted in the business case depend on people adopting processes they were never consulted on, or on a system migration nobody costed in full. Regulated services add a further constraint: service obligations continue whatever the programme timetable says, so every integration step has to be either reversible or demonstrably safe. The judgement this seat needs is the ability to tell which benefits are real, which are borrowed from the future and which belong to someone else's budget.

Month three, month nine, month twenty-four

By day ninety, the Board Strategy Committee should have agreed the value case, the stop rules and the allocation of decisions across the portfolio. Come month nine, each transformation commitment should have been tested against its stop rules, and the work that continues should carry honest cases for adoption, dependency and downside. By month 24 integration leadership and escalation should be embedded in the organisation, and the committee should be reviewing portfolio value on a settled cycle without needing the interim to translate.

An integrator with a buy-side memory

You have made strategy and transformation choices in public-interest and regulated services where delay had a measurable cost, in businesses no smaller than $600 million in revenue and 3,600 people, operating in two or more countries. Buy-side M&A experience is examined closely, alongside crisis response and succession, and so is strategy formation at level 4; building a value case, driving change adoption and running PMO governance are each looked for at level 3. Before approving the continuation of an exception you have identified who bears its economic cost. You keep the controls that earn their place, put a price on every exception, and hand over a deeper bench of operating leaders than you inherited. Open gaps do not paralyse you in front of the committee: you name them and propose a way through. A single country head's objection will not keep a programme alive on your watch, and the result stays yours for all 24 months.

From strategy committee to full board in seven weeks

A one-to-one video call with the Board Strategy Committee opens the sequence during week one. Two weeks on, in week three, you will spend time with the Audit Committee Chair on how stop rules and benefits would be evidenced. Week five puts you in person in front of executive leaders from every function, and the full board of directors has the final word in the seventh week. We will tell you in writing how each step went within three working days.