Director of Special Projects - Finance

IFS•Itasca, IL

2d•$175,000 - $190,000•Hybrid

About The Position

This role sits in the Office of the CFO and is not a conventional finance role. The Finance department holds significant information about the company's cost structure, unit economics, planning, and deviations from the plan. The primary function of this role is to connect finance insights with decisions made in Sales, Services, R&D, and Operations. The position involves leading a small number of substantial cross-functional projects annually and advising on several others. The work spans transformation and analysis, including redesigning planning and allocation processes, building models and reporting for leadership, designing practical operating models and governance, and exploring how AI can transform finance and partner functions. The project portfolio is dynamic, adapting to the company's needs, but the nature of the problems remains consistent: they are cross-functional, often lack a clear owner, and involve stakeholders who may not initially agree. A significant portion of the work involves directing external consulting partners.

Requirements

Comfortable being handed a broad question and a group of stakeholders who do not agree, and turning that into a recommendation people act on. You care as much about whether the change held as about whether the analysis was right.
Fluent enough in financial logic to hold your own in the CFO organization.
Six or more years in management consulting, corporate strategy, finance transformation or business operations, with substantial cross-functional exposure. A consulting background fits well, and so does someone who has already left consulting for industry and wants a broader remit than a single function.
Ownership of complex, multi-stakeholder work from diagnosis through implementation. Not analysis on its own, and not project administration.
Strong quantitative skills and financial literacy. You can build a model or take one apart, work with messy enterprise data, connect operational drivers to financial results, and say plainly what the numbers do and do not support.
Experience designing operating models, processes or organizational structures, and seeing them through to implementation.
Experience working with or inside professional services. You know how an engagement is scoped, priced and staffed, what good delivery looks like, how to get value out of a partner firm and when bringing one in is the wrong answer.
Executive communication. You can write a one-page recommendation and defend it in front of people who disagree with each other, and run a workshop that ends in a decision rather than another meeting.

Nice To Haves

An MBA or comparable advanced degree, or an equivalent record of progression.
Experience with planning, forecasting or resource allocation processes: how they work, where they break and what it takes to redesign one. Deep FP&A ownership is welcome but not expected.
Hands-on work on AI strategy or delivery, such as use case prioritization, build, buy or partner decisions, or getting an AI-enabled product into real use. Technical depth is welcome; judgment about what is realistic matters more.
Working knowledge of SQL, Python or R, and of modern business intelligence and planning tools. You do not need to build the pipeline, but pulling your own data and pressure-testing someone else's analysis will make you faster.
Enterprise software, or another business with recurring revenue and a substantial services component. Post-acquisition integration or carve-out experience.
Shared services or center of excellence design, or work in regulated and high-consequence environments where a decision also has to be defensible.

Responsibilities

Lead initiatives end to end. Frame the problem, build the workplan, run the analysis, drive to a decision with senior stakeholders and stay through implementation. You will not hand over a deck and move on.
Diagnose how the business actually runs. Through interviews, workshops and time in the data, establish how a process really works rather than how it is documented, where cost and effort sit, and which decisions are being made on weak evidence or not being made at all.
Design the future state. Process, structure, roles, governance and a transition plan someone can follow, built with the teams who have to live with it rather than presented to them.
Connect finance, data and operations. Translate across financial logic, the data that describes the business and operational reality: cost structure to process design, forecast variance to capacity decisions, margin pressure to where the work actually happens. Work with Data and Technology teams so the numbers behind those links can be trusted.
Improve the evidence behind decisions. Define the metrics, models and reporting leadership needs, retire what it does not, and make sure assumptions can be inspected and argued with.
Scope and manage external consulting partners. Write the brief and scope of work, evaluate proposals, direct day-to-day delivery, hold external teams to a standard, integrate their output with internal work, control spend against the value delivered, and bring the knowledge back in house when the engagement ends.
Lead blended teams. Run internal, cross-functional and third-party teams without formal authority over most of them. The role may carry direct reports over time.
Shape where AI belongs in this work. Finance and its partner functions have no shortage of candidate use cases across planning, forecasting, close, procurement and workforce processes. The useful contribution is judgment: what is building, in what order, who owns it afterward, and where a human check has to stay. IFS holds its internal AI adoption to the same standard as the software it sells.
In your first six months: take one significant cross-functional problem from framing to a decision the executive team has signed off, with an implementation plan and a named owner. Alongside it, produce a clear read on how one core planning or allocation process works today and what should change.