Funded, and the leader is not in the building

The paper went through. The board has approved the program, the money is real from the start of the quarter, and the first thing the CEO asks is who is running it. The honest answer is that nobody has found that person yet, and the plan assumed they would be in the building on day one.

This is the most common way a program loses its first three months, and it is almost entirely avoidable.

Why funding day is the worst day to start

Budgets are approved in cycles: financial year planning, a half-year reforecast, a board calendar that concentrates capital decisions into a narrow window for many large organisations. When your program is funded, so are a dozen others, and they all need a director with the same platform and the same scars.

The people you want are not reading advertisements. They are finishing a program, or deciding whether to extend, and three other organisations are approaching them in the same fortnight as you. Starting at funding means arriving in that market last, with a brief written in a hurry.

The trap of hiring the available

Under that pressure the search quietly changes from “who is right” to “who can start on Monday”. Someone is between contracts. Someone the vendor recommends. Someone loyal from the last program.

Availability is not a competency. The pattern we see is that the director hired because they were free is the one the steering committee is quietly discussing a year in. The weeks saved at the start are repaid several times over.

Permanent, contract or interim-to-permanent

Permanent fits when the program is the first of several, when it will reshape an operating model you will live with for years, or when the director must own the benefits well after go-live. Longer to find, cheaper over three years, and the knowledge stays in the building.

Contract fits when the program has a defined end, when the skills belong to a platform or vendor you will not keep building on, or when you need someone in weeks. Dearer per month, fast, exit built in.

Interim-to-permanent fits when you need someone now and do not yet know whether the seat survives the program. The interim covers mobilisation and the conversion is decided on evidence, and it works when the candidate knows that is the arrangement from day one.

The wrong model is usually chosen for the right reason, which is speed. Name the problem first and the model follows.

How the market prices the seat

Nobody publishes a rate card. Four things set the number.

Platform. SAP S/4HANA, Oracle, Workday, a core banking or billing replacement: each has its own pool of directors who have taken it live, and the thinner the pool the higher the price.

Scale. Budget, headcount, workstreams, countries. A director who has run a multi-country, multi-vendor program prices differently from one who has run a single-site implementation, and should.

Governance exposure. A regulator watching, a quarterly board paper, a listed company’s disclosure obligations: a program carrying any of these needs someone who has carried it before, and they know what it is worth.

Geography. Sydney and Melbourne have depth. Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Canberra each have a smaller pool, and a director who must relocate or commute will price that in.

Contract day rates and permanent packages move independently, and both move with the funding cycle. We tell you in the first week where the market sits for the seat you have described.

Run it, or reported on it

The CVs look alike. Everyone has “led” a program. Underneath are two populations: those who carried the program, and those who sat in the PMO beside it producing the status report.

One question separates them. Put the candidate in the seat: funded, team half-formed, vendor contract in negotiation, go-live date already in the board paper. What do you do in the first 72 hours? Who do you meet first, what do you ask them, and what do you stop?

People who have run a program answer in specifics and in sequence. They name the sponsor and the CFO before the vendor. They want to see the benefits case and who signed it. They will stop something: a workstream running ahead of a decision, a reporting cadence that is consuming the team, a vendor assumption nobody has tested. People who have reported on a program answer with a framework and a governance diagram.

Then ask what went wrong on the last one and what it cost them personally. That answer tells you whether they were in the room.

Timing: brief before the money lands

The programs that start with a director in the chair are the ones where the search began before the funding decision. The paper is in draft, the sponsor knows roughly when it goes to the board, and the brief is written with funding as a condition rather than a trigger.

In that window we map the market, open conversations with the right people, and tell them plainly that the program is pending approval. When the paper is approved, the shortlist is ready, not the advertisement.

If the money has already landed, the same logic applies in compressed form: brief this week.

What the process looks like with us

For a permanent program director we run a retained search. The market map is on the table at weekly steering: who has been approached, who has said what, and what the market is telling us about the seat. The assessed shortlist arrives with the first-72-hours answers written up and scored against the brief, three to six weeks from brief to accepted offer.

For a contract or interim-to-permanent appointment we work from a bench: program directors we have worked with before, whose programs we followed to go-live, and who can be in front of you within the week. If the market is telling us the seat is mispriced or the model is wrong, you hear it in week one, with the evidence.

A funded program with nobody in the chair is spending the one thing the board gave you that cannot be re-approved: time. Brief early.

Questions clients ask