At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation the Human Resources and Global, Facilities, Events and Travel functions have recently come together to form People and Place. The purpose of People and Place is to create an environment that unleashes the potential in people to accelerate our missions. We activate people and place global solutions in service of the belief that all lives have equal value. We do this by integrating our work to maximize our support of the programmatic, mission-driven work of the foundation.
The People and Place Strategy team leads a limited number of high priority projects and programs known as Global Priority Solutions and Integrated Solutions. These priority projects are identified through a rigorous discovery and input process in partnership with our program strategy teams and foundation leadership. As a member of this team the People and Place Senior Program Manager will lead Global Priority Solutions that are highly complex, risky, business critical initiatives from initiation through closure to achieve People and Place’s strategic objectives.
The Senior Program Manager leads highly complex, risky and business critical programs from initiation through closure to achieve People and Places’ strategic objectives. Shapes senior foundation leadership thinking and aligns strategic decisions to program goals. Coordinates and manages program activities and resources to produce strategic outcomes at the foundation level. This is a new position within the People & Place Organization and reports to the Senior Manager, Strategic Program delivery, while also working collaboratively with colleagues across the foundation.
Possessing or quickly developing a deep understanding of foundation culture and operating norms will be essential to achieve success in this role. Additionally, experience working closely with one or more program strategy teams would be highly valuable and help to ensure that solutions and deliverables are well aligned to the day-to-day needs of program strategy teams.
- Manages the global priority solution team, assesses staffing capacity and capability required to support the strategic priority, balances workload and staff deployment. Manages work through others, influencing and leading one or more project teams to achieve program objectives.
- Drives to a shared vision on cross foundation programs and manages activities, including discovery, design, implementation and change management as well as sustainability plans and powerful exit strategies on one or more programs.
- Integrates program scheduling, budgeting, forecasting, resource planning, contracting, risk and issue management, integrated change control and release management.
- Establishes processes and procedures for maintaining program oversight and decision-making support for policies and practices throughout the course of the program.
- Ensures program complies with established enterprise portfolio management governance and processes including intake, quarterly reviews, and annual planning.
- Collaboration - Works with others openly and transparently to create an environment where diverse view-points are valued, and information is shared with others for the purposes of achieving a shared client experience goal
- Implementation Excellence - Excel at delivering and continuously improving our global solutions in a seamless, consistent way that results in clients understanding changes and more effectively driving foundation impact
- Outcome Driven - Using data to drive decision making, determine the work to be done, assess changes, adapt plans, measure progress, and follow-through on getting the work done in service of the desired client experience outcome(s)
- Functional Expertise - Use functional skills and knowledge to provide solutions to our clients in a consultative manner
- Learning Agility - Ability, curiosity, and willingness to learn from experiences and failures to adapt and adopt new ways of being and thinking to further the impact of the foundation (e.g., take risks, challenge status quo, be open)
- Critical Thinking - The process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information from multiple sources and perspectives to reach an answer or conclusion
- Systems Thinking - Understands the formal and informal intersections and inter-dependencies to be able to frame the problem, evaluate issues, see downstream affects, and identify future implications across the end-to-end system to help prioritize solutions
Additional Key Capabilities
- Ability to bridge programmatic and operational needs of the foundation through a lens of collective success.
- Complex problem solving and plan building.
- Ability to engage effectively with individuals with diverse backgrounds and styles.
- Process design experience and demonstrated systems thinker.
- Organizational change management and continuous improvement frameworks and methods.
- Strong collaboration, communication and influencing skills, including with senior executives and leaders.
- May require vendor management, including selection, negotiation and measurement.
- Demonstrated flexibility and resilience.