Director of Special Projects - Finance

IFS•Itasca, IL

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

This role sits in the Office of the CFO and is not a conventional finance role. Finance holds much of what IFS knows about itself: cost structure, unit economics, how the plan was built and where it has drifted. Most of the decisions that evidence should shape sit somewhere else, in Sales, Services, R&D and Operations. Connecting the two is the job. You will lead a small number of substantial cross-functional projects each year and advise on several more. The work moves between transformation and analysis: redesigning how we plan and allocate, building the models and reporting leadership needs to see the business clearly, designing operating models and governance that hold up in practice, and working out where AI genuinely changes how finance and its partner functions work. The portfolio changes with what the company needs. What stays constant is the shape of the problem. It crosses functions, nobody owns it yet, and the people involved do not start out agreeing. A meaningful part of the work runs through external consulting partners, so you will be directing teams you do not employ about as often as teams you do. Many roles at this level are either functional ownership or advice. This is neither. You take a problem from framing through analysis, decision and implementation, and you stay with it long enough to find out whether it worked. You get direct access to the CFO and the executive team, a small team on your projects, and responsibility for outcomes rather than documents. IFS has grown quickly, organically and through acquisition, so there is real work to do on how the company plans, allocates and decides. This is not a tidy system to maintain.

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.
Cares 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.
Led cross-functional work that ended in a decision someone had to make, and want a broader problem set than any one function can offer.

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 worth 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.