Associate Director Project Management

Responsibilities

• Hold overall accountability for portfolio delivery performance, ensuring commitments on scope, timeline, cost, quality, and compliance are met through effective PM execution.
• Act as the escalation point for high-risk, cross-project, or unresolved issues, ensuring appropriate ownership and resolution across PMs and functions.
• Maintain active oversight of customer satisfaction, ensuring expectations are clearly set, managed, and met throughout the project lifecycle.
• Establish and own the site-level governance framework, aligned to Global PMO standards, including internal project team meetings, joint project team meetings with customers, and steering or governance forums where applicable.
• Ensure governance practices include clear meeting cadence, agendas, minutes, action tracking, and escalation pathways.
• Provide structured portfolio visibility and escalation to site leadership and relevant functional stakeholders.
• Ensure consistent application of project planning disciplines across the PM team, including project schedules, critical path management, and RAID processes.
• Proactively identify and address cross-project risks to timeline, scope, or cost, and drive a proactive, risk-based approach to managing delivery and business exposure.
• Ensure effective scope change management across the project portfolio, with accountability residing at project level with PMs.
• Support and guide PMs, particularly junior PMs, in managing scope change processes and customer discussions, partnering with Business Development on commercial or non-routine changes as required.
• Ensure scope changes follow contractual terms, governance expectations, internal approval processes, and customer communication standards.
• Ensure accurate and timely project financial inputs (forecasting, milestones, risks) are provided by PMs, and partner with Finance to support forward-looking demand visibility across the portfolio.
• Provide regular portfolio-level reporting on project status, schedule and cost variance, key risks, and overall outlook.
• Oversee coordination of invoicing activities to ensure billing is accurate, timely, and aligned with project progress and delivery milestones.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in a scientific, technical, or business discipline (advanced degree preferred)
• Formal Project Management training or certification (PMP / PRINCE2 / equivalent preferred)
• Demonstrated experience both leading client-facing, cross-functional project teams and delivering projects directly in a regulated environment
• Strong working knowledge of project management tools such as Smartsheet or MS Project, with the ability to support the PM team in core tool usage
• Strong commercial, financial, and customer-management acumen