This is an interim backfill role to cover for an employee who will be out on parental leave. The duration of the assignment is targeted for 18 months starting in September. However, the start and end dates may change.
The People and Place Strategy team leads the highest priority projects for the function. 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 HR Senior Program Manager will lead work that is highly complex and business critical from initiation through closure to achieve the strategic objectives.
The Senior Program Manager (SPM) provides leadership to the project team and partners with cross-functional teams to ensure the project delivers the expected scope and is completed with quality, predictability, and transparency. The SPM shapes the project approach and aligns work to the strategic objectives and program goals. The position is responsible for developing and leading a high performing matrixed team of diverse partners as well as coordinating and managing project activities. Many of our projects have a foundation wide technical impact that the SPM will need to navigate along with the foundation wide coordination of prioritization processes and implementation schedules.
An understanding of foundation culture, norms and complexity would be highly valuable and help to ensure that project solutions and deliverables are well aligned to the day-to-day needs of the organization. As such, we are hopeful to identify internal and/or alumni candidates by Friday, August 19th, 2019.
This position reports to the Senior Manager, Strategic Program delivery, and will work closely with People & Place leaders as well as leaders across the foundation.
We believe that energized people, working well together, fueled by great leadership in an inclusive environment in which they thrive, will do outstanding things.
Key Deliverables and Accountabilities
- Handle complex, high priority projects, assess staffing capacity and capability required to support the strategic priority, balance workload and staff deployment. Run work through others, influencing and leading one or more project teams to achieve program objectives.
- Aim to a shared vision on cross foundation projects and manage activities, including discovery, design, implementation and change management as well as sustainability plans and powerful exit strategies on one or more projects.
- Integrates program scheduling, budgeting, forecasting, resource planning, contracting, risk and issue management, integrated change control and release management.
- Establishes processes and procedures for maintaining project oversight and decision-making support for policies and practices throughout the course of the project.
- Ensures project aligns with established enterprise portfolio management governance and processes including intake, quarterly reviews, and annual planning.
- Seamlessly integrates process change as well as systems changes throughout the project paying special attention to the impact of the project on the ongoing foundation processes.
Key Capabilities
- 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.
- Technical Project Management Skills – Understands the principles of Agile technical project management and how to work with technical agile teams.
- Effective Communication – Clearly and effectively articulate project risks, decision options, high level analysis findings and detailed technical impacts to all levels of the foundation.
- 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, technical project management and continuous improvement frameworks and methods.
- Strong collaboration, communication and influencing skills, including with senior executives and leaders.
- Demonstrated flexibility and resilience.
- 8+ years of experience, or equivalent experience. The ideal candidate will have demonstrated experience leading large, complex projects either as part of an internal project or program management team or as a management consultant.