Interim Chief Transformation Officer — Portfolio Recovery

Stop rules written before they are needed

A stop rule is only useful if it is agreed while everyone is still optimistic. Written later, it becomes a negotiation with the people whose work it would end. The Interim Chief Transformation Officer is appointed to set those rules, together with a value case for every initiative in the transformation portfolio, and to apply them over 24 months with executive authority on behalf of the Group Chief Executive Officer.

A credible value case in a technology portfolio states what will change for customers or costs, by when, how it will be measured and what has to be true for it to work. A credible stop rule names the signal that would end the initiative and who will act on it. Together they turn portfolio review from a debate about effort into a decision about evidence.

Your authority extends across the portfolio. You will draw the line below which local leaders decide alone, and choose the measures by which money, engineering time and controls are judged across the portfolio. Every commitment is kept, suspended or closed on your ruling. You can stop a proposal whose risk nobody has agreed to carry, and refuse an investment case that cannot say who will adopt the outcome, what it hinges on or how badly it could disappoint. You approve how the transformation leadership is organised and how issues travel upward, broker agreement when the Group Chief Executive Officer and the heads of operations disagree, and decide the cadence of the board's reviews of progress, exceptions and outstanding choices.

Twenty-four months of the rules doing their work

By day ninety, every initiative should carry a value case and stop rules that the Group Chief Executive Officer has accepted, and a named person responsible for each. By around month nine the stop rules should have been applied in earnest: failing initiatives ended, and the capacity they held reassigned to the strongest cases. By month 24 the portfolio should be governed through a settled review cadence, value evidenced initiative by initiative, and stop decisions taken by local owners without your involvement.

The person, and the conversations

You can tell local judgement a market really needs from habits kept alive only by precedent, and you document where the boundary sits. Your experience comes from technology or digital platforms businesses that turned over $585 million or more and employed 900 or more across at least five countries, in settings where the product, data and engineering platform had to keep running through a change of leadership. The board weighs culture reset, professionalisation and buy-side M&A; a culture reset matters here because stop rules only work where ending something is not treated as failure. Strategy formation at level 4 is the core capability; value-case rigour, change adoption and PMO governance should each sit at level 3. You can tell a chief executive what is still unknown and keep the work moving anyway.

Selection unfolds across seven weeks: a confidential first call, by video, with the Group Chief Executive Officer in week one; in week three, time with the Risk Committee Chair spent writing a stop rule for a contested initiative; in week five, a panel of executives, met in person, who between them lead every function; and in week seven, the directors meeting you as a board. Expect our answer in writing within 4 working days of each one.