Global Sr Program Director

Why we're hiring:

At WPP, our talented people, enabled by technology, are at the heart of everything we do. The WPP People team is undergoing a significant transformation to modernize ways of working, shift to Workday HCM and drive automation to digitise the colleague experience.

As part of this transformation journey the Global HCM People Team are initiating a search to find the right individual to become a leader of our team

What you'll be doing:

WPP is seeking a Global Senior Program Director for Workday HCM to lead the internal program delivery team, wider WPP internal stakeholders and external partners and vendors, ensuring deliverables are completed according to measures of quality, time, and scope. This role will be responsible for leading program progress, ensuring executive level status updates, decision logs and RAID items are detailed and ready for Steerco, executive and program reporting and decision-making.

This collaborative individual is a well-rounded global business and IT program management expert, has extensive experience in leading global HCM and/or related HR platform rollouts, and will fit with our collaborative culture.

What you will be doing: 

• Lead, through a PMO matrixed framework, multi-disciplinary globally distributed teams in the IT and People function, to successfully execute complex and simultaneous projects within the Workday HCM portfolio.
• Establish goals, tasks, dependencies, target dates & timelines, activities, owners of tasks/actions, and status at a programmatic level within the team.
• Be adept at working in both an Agile and a traditional Project Management environment, depending on the program needs.
• Be the right hand for the business team; anticipate their needs to further the project’s success.
• Lead and facilitate meetings and communicate updates to program stakeholders (project team, external clients, senior management and the executive team) as needed.
• Oversee the team on preparation and publishing of weekly, monthly and quarterly program reports/status for the internal team and management to be informed of the project’s health (i.e., open/at risk/completed items).
• Owns organization of program onboarding across the cross-functional team to ensure consistency across local and global program regions.
• Provide consultation on deeper analysis and works with relevant teams to develop briefs for senior management project escalations.
• Drives continuous improvements for the team’s delivery practices, processes and procedures.
• Coach the team as needed in best practices relative to project methodology.
• Ensure the committed work is delivered to specification, quality, scope and time.
• Champion an iterative planning process; work with the team to define the work that will be packaged into releases and delivered.
• Partner with senior Technical Leaders to create and manage technical plans, ascertained by working with the project team to define the deliverables that will be developed in each release of the product.

What you need: 

• Ability to manage multiple program workstreams and deliverables, identifying risks, issues, and dependencies among projects.
• Proactively identifies, tracks, and mitigates project risks and issues, escalating appropriately.
• Communicates calmly, concisely and generates confidence, even in crises/conflicts.
• Ensures team members take personal accountability for deliverables and projects, engaging in all aspects of team assignments.
• Lead the development, agreement of measurement/success criteria and maintenance for program evaluation ensuring objectives and metrics.
• Leads Post Project Reviews and ensures key learnings are shared with relevant parties and actively used to optimize future ways of working in the program.
• Engages with stakeholders to maintain and optimize ongoing program roadmap post deployment phases.
• Possesses expert active listening skills, develops rapport, and can identify key issues and communicate them appropriately.
• Review and approve 3rd party invoices for workstreams associated with the program.
• Partner with workstream leads on risk mitigation plans and criteria and monitoring for technical, operational, data and business readiness.

REQUIRED EXPERIENCE

• Flexible PMO professional who can lead through ambiguity, quickly diagnose and apply the right methods to the situation, with the ability to pivot approach as our dynamic environment often requires
• +15 years of experience using both traditional and agile project methodologies in a global capacity to lead complex technology programs with balanced experience in HRIS and the HR lifecycle; this is a hybrid Technology & HR leadership role.
• Bachelor's degree or appropriate field of study
• Expert knowledge and experience in the end-to-end deployment of HCM within large, global complex organizations Deep understanding of HR systems and related platforms and how they can be applied to gain benefit and efficiencies in a complex organization.
• Excellent leadership and matrix team management skills.
• Strong analytical, critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal leadership skills.
• Experience in managing data-driven dependencies and large-scale global platform roll-outs.
• Expert in top-down and bottom-up estimation skills and program flighting.
• Proven ability to set up and lead roll out program operational management and governance, workflow and infrastructure.

Who we are:

You're open: We are inclusive and collaborative; we encourage the free exchange of ideas; we respect and celebrate diverse views. We are accepting of new ideas, new partnerships, new ways of working.

You're optimistic: We believe in the power of creativity, technology and talent to create brighter futures or our people, our clients and our communities. We approach all that we do with conviction: to try the new and to seek the unexpected.

You're extraordinary: we are stronger together: through collaboration we achieve the amazing. We are creative leaders and pioneers of our industry; we provide extraordinary every day.

What we'll give you:

• Passionate, inspired people - We promote a culture of people that do extraordinary work.
• Scale and opportunity - We offer the opportunity to create, influence and complete projects at a scale that is unparalleled in the industry.
• Challenging and stimulating work - Unique work and the opportunity to join a group of creative problem solvers. Are you up for the challenge?

WPP is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without regard to race, color, religion or belief, sex, age, national origin, citizenship status, marital status, military/veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, physical or mental disability. We believe in creating a dynamic work environment that values diversity and inclusion and strives to recruit a diverse slate of candidates to help us achieve that goal.

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