Interim Chief Quality and Service Officer — Reliability at Scale

Reliability before volume, in that order

Growth is easy to celebrate and reliability is easy to postpone. The Interim Chief Quality and Service Officer is appointed to reverse that instinct, so that when the business decides to take on more volume it already knows whether its service can carry the load. The post reports to the Regional President and carries executive authority over quality and service for the next 12 months.

Quality decisions that will be yours

You will agree which quality and service decisions stay with local leadership and the threshold at which they rise to you. You will define what evidence a spending or capacity decision must carry, so that reliability data sits beside commercial forecasts rather than behind them. Inherited service commitments are yours to keep, suspend or close. A proposal that hands a service risk to a team that has not agreed to hold it can be refused, as can investment whose case never says who will use the improvement, what it depends on or how it could go wrong. You approve how the quality and service team is organised, arbitrate when the Regional President and operating leaders pull in different directions, and decide how often the board hears about progress, slipped standards and decisions still pending.

Reliability is an agreement, not a dashboard

In technology services reliability is rarely one number. It is a shared definition of what a service must deliver, measured the same way across teams that ship at different speeds, and a habit of tracing each recurring failure to someone who will fix its cause rather than its symptom. A strong quality officer makes that definition concrete, then guards it when a large opportunity arrives and everyone wants an exception.

Reliability standards, then reliability habits

Inside the first ninety days, reliability standards, the evidence behind them and the people answerable for quality exceptions should be agreed with the Regional President. Around month nine reliability should be reviewed before every volume decision as routine, and recurring service failures should be traced to owners and closed against the standards. By month 12 the discipline should run on its own: growth proposals tested against reliability evidence before capacity is committed, whether or not you are in the room.

A record that has held under pressure

The operations you have led, in technology or digital platforms, ran to $710 million or more of revenue with 1,300 people or more, spread over four countries at least. The board looks in your history for professionalisation, for succession and for buy-side M&A; acquisitions in particular reveal whether quality standards survive when two service cultures meet. Operating cadence at level 4 leads, with operating model, network footprint, and quality and safety each at level 3. You have put a disputed downside to a senior executive without softening it, and you have withheld money from a service case that could not say who would use it or what could go wrong.

Meeting the Regional President, the Audit Committee Chair and the board

Selection begins in week one with a confidential video meeting with the Regional President. The third week is a working session with the Audit Committee Chair on how service failures and their controls should be reported. Week five is a half-day, in person, with a panel of executives who lead the company's functions, and week seven ends the process in discussion with the directors. Each stage receives our response in writing inside 3 working days.