The seat becomes empty in one of three ways. The programme lead resigns, often to a vendor or a competitor, and gives a month's notice into a programme that needs a year. The programme lead is removed, which means the steering group has finally made a decision and now needs someone to absorb the consequences. Or the programme was never properly led — it grew out of a project, the project manager kept the title, and the organisation has only just noticed that a DKK 120 million transformation is being run by someone who was hired to deliver a system.
In each case the sponsor wants the same thing from an interim: stability. Keep the vendors calm, keep the steering group calm, keep the team from following the last lead out of the door. That is a reasonable ask, and it is not what the programme needs. What the programme needs is decisions — usually the same decisions it has needed for six months, which the previous lead either could not get made or was not permitted to raise.
The first thirty days is about reconciling those two things: enough stability that the programme keeps moving, enough decision-making that it starts moving in a direction. Here is how the month runs, and the mistakes that are easiest to make in it.
Week one: read the decision record. There is not one
The first thing to ask for is the record of what the programme has decided — scope changes, re-baselines, vendor variations, the reasons. There will be steering group minutes, and they will say "discussed" and "noted" and "to be revisited". There will be a change log, maintained by the PMO, recording what changed and not why. The actual decisions live in email threads, in the previous lead's head, and in the memory of two or three workstream leads who have been there from the start.
Reconstructing it is the first week's work, and it is done by interview, not by reading. Two levels down from the steering group: the workstream leads, the delivery managers, the architect who has been raising the same integration risk since month two, the vendor's delivery manager who is not the account director. Ask each of them what was decided and what was descoped. The gaps between their answers are the programme's real status.
Find out what green means here, too. Every organisation drifts its RAG definitions, and a new lead who reports against the inherited meaning will inherit the inherited credibility.
By the end of week one the interim should have a written list of the decisions the programme is waiting for, with the date each was first raised. I have written elsewhere about why steering groups need this list in front of them; the interim's first job is to produce it, because nobody else will.
Week two: the vendor conversation nobody has had
Most stalled programmes have a vendor problem that has been managed rather than addressed. The contract manager has been logging underperformance, the delivery manager has been escalating internally, and the person with the standing to call the vendor's account director has never done so — because that person was the previous lead, and the previous lead was either conflict-averse or had a relationship to protect.
The interim has neither history nor relationship, which is the one structural advantage of the role. Use it in week two, not month three. A direct conversation with the vendor's senior person — here is what the delivery data shows, here is what the contract says, here is what changes from next month — does more for the programme than any re-plan, because it tells the vendor that the rules have changed and tells the team that someone is prepared to say so.
In the public sector this conversation has a constraint the private sector does not: the vendor was selected under EU procurement rules, and replacing them is a process measured in quarters, not weeks. That does not make the conversation less necessary. It makes it more so, because the threat of exit is not available and the relationship has to be fixed rather than ended. The contract is the lever. Read it in week one; use it in week two.
Week three: re-baseline once, honestly, with the sponsor in the room
By week three the interim knows enough to say what the programme can actually deliver, by when, for what. That is the re-baseline, and there are three rules for it.
Do it once. A programme that re-baselines twice has told its steering group that its plans mean nothing. The first re-baseline under an interim is credible precisely because the interim has no stake in the old plan; the second is a sign that the first was optimistic. Take the time to get it right and pad it less than instinct suggests, because the sponsor will pad it again.
Scope, funding and dates together. A re-baseline that moves the date and leaves the scope and the funding untouched is a delay, not a decision. If the programme cannot deliver the original scope in the funded envelope, say which of the three moves. That is the decision the previous lead could not get made.
The sponsor in the room, not in the distribution list. A re-baseline the sponsor hears second-hand from a steering group pack is a re-baseline the sponsor will reopen. This is the one meeting in the first month that has to be face to face and cannot be delegated.
The benefits case usually needs revisiting at the same time, because the original number was written for the original scope. It is uncomfortable to tell a sponsor that the programme will deliver less value than the board approved; it is worse to let them discover it at the benefits review. The returns gap opens here, in the re-baseline that moved the outputs and forgot the outcomes.
Week four: the handover starts now
An interim who becomes necessary has failed at the job. Whatever the engagement letter says, the role is to hand over a programme that can be led by somebody who is actually available — an internal successor, a permanent hire, occasionally a promoted workstream lead. Handover planned in the last month is a handover that does not happen; the interim's contract is extended, and extended again, and the organisation has quietly acquired a dependency it never intended.
So week four is when the successor question is put to the sponsor in writing. Is there an internal candidate? If so, what do they need — a role, a mandate, six months alongside? If not, what does the permanent role look like, and can the hiring start now so that it concludes before the interim's term does? The interim can help define the role, sit on the panel, and onboard whoever takes it. None of that is possible if the question is asked in month nine.
From week four onwards, every decision the interim makes is documented as if the successor were reading it next Monday. The decision record that did not exist in week one should exist by week eight — not as a governance artefact, but as the thing that makes the seat handoverable at all.
What not to do in the first month
Do not restructure the team. The interim does not yet know who is carrying the programme and who is carried, and the people who look strongest in week one are often the ones best at managing upwards. Restructuring in month one loses the quiet competent people and keeps the articulate ones.
Do not change the tooling, the methodology or the reporting format. Each of those is a month of disruption dressed as improvement, and none of them is why the programme stalled.
Do not promise the date. The sponsor will ask in the first week, and the honest answer is "after the re-baseline, in week three". A date given in week one is a date given without evidence, and it will be the first thing the interim is held to.
And do not agree to a mandate that is not in writing. An interim's authority is entirely borrowed, and it is borrowed from the sponsor. What the interim can decide, what they can spend, whom they can move and which vendor conversations they can have on the organisation's behalf — all of it should be in a page the sponsor has signed before the interim's first steering group. Without it, every decision is an escalation, and the programme is back where it was.
The Nordic specifics
Two things are different here. Employee representation is real and structured — samarbejdsudvalg in Denmark, works councils across the region — and a programme that changes how people work has obligations to consult that an interim from outside the culture can underestimate. Build the consultation into the re-baseline; it is not an obstacle to the plan, it is part of the plan's credibility.
And the flat hierarchy that makes Nordic organisations pleasant to work in makes an interim's borrowed authority harder to exercise. Nobody will refuse a decision outright. They will agree with it warmly and continue as before. The mitigation is the same as everywhere: explicit decisions, dated, written, and followed up in the next steering group by name.
This is the shape of interim programme leadership as I take it on — three to four days a week, the full seat including steering group, budget and vendors, and a handover planned from the first week rather than the last. The thirty days above is the part of the engagement that decides whether the rest of it works.