Interim Chief Quality and Service Officer — Performance Renewal

The calls that decide whether automation helps or hurts

Automating a process that nobody owns does not fix it; it makes the confusion faster and harder to see. The Interim Chief Quality and Service Officer is appointed to make sure automation follows ownership rather than racing ahead of it, and holds executive authority, under the Country Managing Director, to set the order in which it happens. The seat turns on a few recurring judgements.

The first is when a process is stable enough to automate. Stability here means an owner everyone recognises, an agreed standard, and quality and service results that vary for understood reasons. A process that fails one of those tests should be fixed first, however attractive the automation case. The second judgement is sequencing. Automation projects compete for the same engineering time and the same operational attention, and the order in which they run can matter as much as which ones run. The third is where to keep local thresholds and where to impose a common rule, which the officer will set for quality, service and automation decisions alike, together with the proof any spending, capacity or control decision must carry.

The fourth is what to stop. Some inherited commitments will be carried forward, some held and some ended, and the officer should expect to defend the ending of at least one popular automation project with evidence and with a clear account of the capacity it frees. Operational proposals that would park cost or risk with another team without its agreement will be stopped, and investment will be declined where nobody has shown how the change will be adopted, what it leans on and what happens if it fails. The officer also approves the quality and service leadership structure and resolves conflicts between the Country Managing Director and operating leaders before engineering time or budget is committed.

Twenty-four months of ownership before speed

The first ninety days should establish who owns each process, a quality and service baseline, and the sequence in which automation will proceed, all agreed with the Country Managing Director. By around month nine automation should have started only where process ownership is stable, and quality and service exceptions should be owned and tracked rather than absorbed. By month 24 automated processes should be running under accountable owners and quality controls, reported to the board, with successors in place.

Acquisitions as a test of ownership

Your operations leadership will have covered at least $805 million in revenue and 2,500 people, in two countries. We will examine what you have done in digital transformation, in succession and in buy-side M&A. Acquisitions are especially relevant: integrating an acquired operation is a crash course in discovering which processes nobody really owned. Operating cadence is required at level 4. Operating model, network footprint, and quality and safety are each required at level 3. You have ended an automation commitment nobody would own before it did harm, you can tell a market's genuine need for an exception from one kept only by habit, and you can put an open question to the Country Managing Director while still moving forward.

Meeting the business

Stage one, in week one, is a video discussion with the Country Managing Director, held in confidence. By week three you are working with the Audit Committee Chair on quality controls and how exceptions are closed. Week five is given to an in-person panel of executive leaders, one for each function, and the full board completes the process in week seven. Every stage gets our written verdict within three working days.