Enterprise Driver Architecture Director

The mandate

The appointment owns the durable connection between strategic choices, operating assumptions and the numbers presented for executive decisions. Planning currently produces answers, but not a sufficiently explicit account of which commercial and operational drivers created them. The first-year task is to make causality visible without turning planning into an exercise in false precision.

The Director will establish an enterprise value-driver architecture that reconciles the long-range view, annual plan, rolling forecast and management outlook. That architecture must distinguish controllable levers from external variables, expose dependencies between demand, capacity, price, productivity and cash, and preserve a traceable route from source assumption to reported outcome.

This is a permanent decision-support leadership seat, not stewardship of a planning calendar. It carries authority to approve modelling standards, retire unsupported measures, require accountable assumption owners and return submissions that cannot be reconciled. Business leaders retain operating decisions; the Director determines whether the financial evidence is decision-ready.

By month twelve, the executive team should be able to test a strategic choice through a common set of drivers, understand the range around the answer and see who owns each premise. Success will be judged by forecast explainability, shorter reconciliation cycles, fewer off-model adjustments and the quality of decisions changed by the analysis.

What you will own

• Define a signed value-driver dictionary linking operational inputs to revenue, margin, cash and return measures, with ownership, refresh frequency and permitted sources for every material assumption.
• Rebuild the planning model around causal equations and sensitivity ranges, then secure formal approval from finance and operating owners for the first production cycle.
• Establish an assumption council that resolves competing views before consolidation and records decisions, dissent, expiry dates and subsequent forecast accuracy.
• Introduce driver-level bridges that explain plan-to-forecast and forecast-to-actual movement without unexplained balancing items or narrative substitutes for quantified causes.
• Approve modelling controls, version discipline and scenario conventions, including the right to reject locally convenient calculations that break enterprise comparability.
• Create an executive decision pack that presents a base case, credible bounds, trigger points and reversible actions rather than a single-point forecast.
• Build and succession-plan a team of planning architects and finance partners capable of maintaining the framework after initial redesign work ends.

Candidate qualifications

• At least 15 years in financial planning and decision support, including five years leading Director-level enterprise or multi-market planning teams.
• Documentary evidence of a driver-based model that changed resource allocation, with a clear explanation of causal design, governance and realised financial effect.
• Mastery of integrated income statement, balance-sheet and cash-flow modelling, sensitivity analysis, statistical forecast interpretation and management-accounting controls.
• Proof of reconciling strategic, operating and financial vocabularies across senior stakeholders without disguising disagreement inside model complexity.
• Experience creating planning policy, data lineage and model-change controls that survived audit, leadership turnover and multiple planning cycles.
• Examples of challenging a highly sponsored assumption, preserving the relationship and producing a better decision through evidence rather than positional authority.

Working terms and boundaries

• The role is an ongoing appointment with first-year gates at days 90 and 180 and at the completion of the first fully driver-led annual planning cycle.
• Authority covers planning standards, assumption governance and decision-readiness; it does not transfer operating budget ownership from accountable executives.
• Hybrid attendance will be concentrated around assumption councils, executive scenario sessions and quarterly performance reviews, with other work arranged around outcomes.
• First-year completion requires an approved driver dictionary, an operational model, trained successors and evidence that executives are using ranges and triggers in live decisions.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 5 October 2026. Mandate reference FPA-PER-2026-LON-01.