Zero-Based Resource Allocation Director

The mandate

This six-month commission will design and run one zero-based resource-allocation cycle for selected cost and investment pools. The problem is not to impose an undifferentiated reduction. It is to expose which activities create required outcomes, which service levels are deliberate and which resources persist because historical budgets have never been challenged from first principles.

The five contracted artifacts are a resource baseline, activity-and-outcome map, decision-package standard, challenge record, and approved allocation and carry-forward handbook. The consultant will also facilitate one complete challenge cycle and quantify implementation dependencies, but will not execute workforce or supplier decisions.

Milestones fall at weeks four, eight, fourteen, nineteen and twenty-four. The FP&A lead accepts the baseline; designated operating sponsors accept activity maps; the Steering Group accepts decision packages, allocation recommendations and final handbook. Acceptance requires reconciled totals, explicit service consequences, evidence-rated options and named implementation owners.

The client will provide controlled spend and workforce extracts, accountable activity owners, agreed policy constraints, access to existing commitments and timely decisions on minimum service requirements. Where evidence is unavailable, the consultant must show the gap and range rather than fabricate a bottom-up answer. Late inputs pass through milestone change control.

What you will own

• Reconcile the in-scope resource baseline across cost owner, activity, commitment horizon and controllability, with no unassigned material balance.
• Map activities to legally, operationally or strategically required outcomes and distinguish minimum, current and enhanced service levels.
• Design decision packages showing resources, consequence, dependency, timing, reversibility and evidence for each service option.
• Facilitate challenges that test necessity, quantity, price, method and timing without equating lower spend with better value.
• Quantify trapped costs, transition burdens and capacity effects so recommended reductions do not assume immediate cash release.
• Produce an allocation recommendation that preserves totals, documents dissent and identifies choices requiring executive rather than analytical judgement.
• Establish benefit-tracking rules separating avoided spend, released cash, redeployed capacity and performance improvement.
• Transfer package maintenance and future-cycle governance to internal owners through a dry run and scored capability check.

Candidate qualifications

• At least 15 years in FP&A, cost strategy or resource-allocation transformation, including three zero-based cycles personally directed.
• Evidence of building decision packages from activity and outcome logic rather than applying centrally chosen reduction percentages.
• Strong cost-behavior, controllability, service-level, transition-cost, capacity and benefit-validation expertise.
• A case where you rejected an apparent saving after identifying trapped cost or an unpriced service consequence.
• Experience facilitating contested resource choices across senior owners and maintaining a complete decision and dissent record.
• Ability to reconcile granular bottom-up packages to controlled finance totals in a Portuguese- and English-speaking setting.
• Proof of leaving an internal method that ran after the consulting team departed, including owner training and control documentation.

Working terms and boundaries

• Delivery covers six months at four days a week and five milestones, with formal acceptance criteria attached to each artifact.
• Scope includes design, facilitation and allocation recommendation; workforce actions, procurement negotiations and operational implementation are excluded.
• The consultant may reject analytically incomplete packages but cannot approve budgets or determine mandatory service levels.
• Controlled extracts, policy constraints, activity-owner participation and executive service choices are client dependencies tracked from mobilisation.
• Completion requires reconciled approved recommendations, a working benefits ledger, transferred governance and closure of all critical evidence gaps.

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 12 October 2026. Mandate reference FPA-CON-2026-SAO-16.