Global Engineering Decision-Rights Architect

The mandate

The bank intends to move several platform and product domains into an India GCC, but current plans transfer roles, tickets and cost while retaining architecture, roadmap, release and risk decisions in New York and London. The defined problem is to create a charter in which India owns measurable outcomes without fragmenting regulated accountability or manufacturing permanent approval queues.

The named deliverable is a Global Engineering Decision-Rights Architecture and Transfer Playbook. It must map products, services and controls; assign decide, propose, execute, assure and escalate rights; define parent and GCC forums, leadership roles, funding, metrics, source-team exit, risk acceptance, talent gates and a sequenced transfer for four representative domains.

Four milestones govern five months: by week three, accept the domain and decision inventory; by week nine, deliver current-state dependency and authority maps; by week sixteen, test the proposed model through four decision simulations; and by week twenty-two, submit the charter, transfer playbook, value baseline and board paper. Each invoice follows milestone acceptance.

The technology officer and sponsor council will accept the work only when every material decision has one accountable owner, regulatory assurance remains independent of delivery, India leaders can resolve simulated roadmap, incident, architecture and supplier choices inside stated thresholds, source roles have explicit exit dates, and client teams can apply the model to an unstudied domain without consultant interpretation.

The client will provide organisation charts, service inventories, committee terms, risk delegations, budgets, vendor contracts, incident examples, roadmap histories, talent plans and access to headquarters and India leaders. The consultant will not recruit executives, execute transfers, amend regulated policies, negotiate suppliers or select the GCC site; unresolved sponsor choices remain visible in the final architecture.

Why this is external work

Headquarters functions each prefer to preserve their existing approvals, while the India programme is measured on roles moved rather than authority exercised. Internal design has therefore produced a consensual but hollow charter. An independent specialist is needed to surface contested decisions, run them through the proposed model and prevent the GCC from becoming a remote delivery layer described as product ownership.

What you will own

• Catalogue recurring product, architecture, release, risk, incident, funding, talent and supplier decisions across four target domains.
• Trace hidden approvals, information dependencies, vetoes and escalation latency between headquarters, regions and prospective India leadership.
• Assign decide, propose, execute, assure and challenge rights with financial, risk and service thresholds for each decision class.
• Design sponsor, product and engineering forums that resolve genuine cross-border choices without duplicating existing governance.
• Define source-team exit, knowledge evidence, successor readiness and transfer gates based on decisions exercised rather than documents delivered.
• Establish value measures spanning product outcomes, resilience, speed, control quality, talent depth and fully burdened cost.
• Deliver the signed charter, domain playbook, simulation evidence, transition backlog and unresolved executive decision register.

Candidate qualifications

• Designed cross-border product and engineering decision rights for a regulated bank or comparably controlled institution.
• Moved accountable product or platform ownership into an India GCC rather than transferring only delivery capacity.
• Separated management authority from independent risk and control assurance without creating permanent approval bottlenecks.
• Used live or simulated decisions to expose a charter that looked clear on organisation charts but failed operationally.
• Built source-team exit and successor-readiness gates tied to exercised authority, service outcomes and talent depth.
• Delivered an operating model that headquarters and GCC leaders applied independently after consulting completion.

Non-negotiables

• Can complete both India residencies and all headquarters milestone reviews within five months.
• Will disclose relationships with banks, GCC advisers, location partners, technology vendors and executive-search firms.
• Brings executed ownership transfer into India; shared-services design or organisation-chart work alone is insufficient.
• Accepts client-run decision simulations and explicit source-role exits as final acceptance conditions.

1. 49 words maximum. Describe a product decision that remained at headquarters after its role was supposedly transferred to a GCC.
2. 49 words maximum. Which four decision simulations would you use to test this banking engineering charter?
3. 49 words maximum. How would you preserve independent risk challenge without recreating a headquarters approval queue?