Four Months Left in the Plan

Your team is back this week. The plan you approved last winter has about four months of calendar left, and two or three items on it have not moved since spring.

The plan was not wrong. It counted on people you did not end up having. Someone resigned, a system project ran long, or the work landed on a person who already had a full job. By June the initiative had a status colour instead of a start date.

Four months is about seventeen weeks. That is enough time to finish one of those initiatives, if the weeks go to the work rather than to the search.

Find the unowned initiatives

Open the plan. Count the initiatives. Then count how many have one specific person accountable for delivery.

The gap between those two numbers is your real risk for the rest of the year. An initiative with no name beside it is unstaffed, and it has been since the day someone wrote it down, because there was an assumption that somebody on staff would pick it up. If somebody had, it would have moved by now.

Unstaffed work looks like a scheduling problem, so it gets managed as one. It moves a month, then another month, then into next year's plan with the blank still beside it.

Name the gap: leadership, expertise, or capacity

Before you start any process to fill the role, identify the kind of gap you have. The name you give it decides who you are looking for, what you are paying for, and how quickly you can start.

A leadership gap means the seat is empty, or empty in every way that counts. The team has nobody to escalate to. Decisions sit. The function needs an owner while you sort out the permanent answer. That work has no natural end date, and it needs someone who can run a team in week one.

An expertise gap means your leadership is in place and working, but one project needs a skill nobody on the team has used before. A finance system rollout. A first real forecasting model. A funding application. A compliance build. That work has a clear finish line, and it needs someone who has done the same job five or six times.

A capacity gap means you have the leaders and you have the expertise, and both are already committed. A transformation lands, or you acquire a company, and the new work arrives at a team that was full before it got there. Nothing is missing from the org chart, so the work goes to the people already on it. That work has a peak and then a drop, and it needs hands for the stretch in between.

Named correctly, the gap becomes a brief you can act on. A leadership gap gives you a short list of operators who have run the function at your scale. An expertise gap gives you people who have delivered that specific build before, and you can ask them how the last three went. A capacity gap gives you someone who takes defined work off the team on Monday and hands it back finished. Each of those is a specific request you can hand to your network or a search partner and get names back quickly.

Contract, fractional, or full-time

Each gap points at a different structure. Two questions sort it: does the work end, and does it need someone every week?

Contract fits work that finishes. A defined scope, a delivery date, an agreed number of hours, and a close. This is usually the answer for an expertise gap or a capacity gap. The system goes live, the application is submitted, the backlog clears, and the engagement ends. You are buying a deliverable, and the cost stops when the deliverable lands.

Fractional fits work that continues but does not need five days a week. The function needs an owner every week, not every day. This is usually the answer for a leadership gap, either while you sort out the permanent seat or because the role is real but not yet a full week's work. You are buying judgment and continuity rather than a deliverable, so there is no finish date to write down, and either side can revisit the days per month as the need changes.

Full-time fits work that does not end. The role is still there next year and the year after, it takes five days a week, and it belongs in the budget as a permanent line. That is the test worth applying now: Staff a project that ends in December with a permanent hire and you create a new problem in January.

The people who take contract and fractional engagements are not between jobs. They have twenty and thirty years behind them, they have run the function at full scale, and they choose work by the problem rather than by the org chart.

What this looks like from here

Seventeen weeks, and the work itself needs most of them. A search that starts this month puts someone in the seat in September, which leaves close to a full quarter to deliver. The deadline does not move, so every week spent deciding what kind of person to look for comes out of the delivery end.

Find the blanks. Name the specific type of gap. Choose the structure that matches how the work ends.

The plan is still achievable. It just needs the names filled in.