Director, PMO

Overview

PowerPlan is seeking a Director of the Project Management Office to strengthen and, where necessary, redesign the Professional Services delivery operating model.

This is a hands-on, roll-up-your-sleeves leadership role. PowerPlan is seeking an executive operator and coach on the field-a leader who drives change from within the work alongside the team, not from above it.

This leader will oversee a portfolio of up to 150 concurrent enterprise software implementation, upgrade, migration, and optimization engagements serving energy and utility customers. The Director will be accountable for improving portfolio control, customer outcomes, financial performance, delivery predictability, and the capabilities of PowerPlan's Project and Program Management organization.

The successful candidate will inherit an established PMO with existing people, processes, and technology, but with opportunities to improve consistency in execution, governance adherence, portfolio visibility, data quality, forecasting, and accountability.

This is not a methodology administration role.

The Director will be expected to rapidly diagnose root causes, distinguish process gaps from capability and accountability gaps, stabilize critical engagements, harden the delivery operating model, and drive sustained behavioral adoption across Project Managers, Program Managers, delivery leaders, and cross-functional partners.

This is a hands-on PMO transformation and portfolio leadership mandate. The Director must be equally capable of designing scalable systems, confronting weak execution, developing leaders, managing customer escalations, and translating portfolio performance into clear business decisions.

This is an executive operator role, not an ivory-tower directorship. PowerPlan is looking for a coach on the field-a leader who rolls up their sleeves, works shoulder to shoulder with Project and Program Managers, and steps directly into the work when it matters. The Director sets strategy and builds durable systems, but leads from the field: in the reviews, in the recoveries, and alongside the team, never from a distance.

The Director will serve as the business owner for PMO methodology, delivery governance, portfolio assurance, and Certinia PSA, formerly FinancialForce. The role will also provide selective executive sponsorship to PowerPlan's most strategic or highest-risk customer programs.
COMPANY

PowerPlan develops enterprise-grade tax, accounting, reporting, and workflow automation solutions tailored specifically for energy industry organizations.

Our customers operate in environments where financial accuracy, regulatory compliance, operational reliability, and scalability are critical. PowerPlan's Professional Services organization partners with customers through implementations, upgrades, SaaS migrations, packaged solutions, and optimization engagements that deliver measurable financial and operational outcomes for the office of the CFO.

Responsibilities

The Director, PMO is accountable for creating a Professional Services delivery system in which:

• Project health is visible, evidence-based, and trusted
• Commitments are realistic and supported by executable plans
• Delivery risks are surfaced early and acted upon decisively
• Scope, schedule, financials, resources, dependencies, and customer readiness are actively controlled
• Project Managers and Program Managers are held accountable for outcomes, not merely process completion
• Cross-functional blockers are escalated and resolved with clear ownership
• Leadership can rely on portfolio data and forecasts to make business decisions
• Governance is proportional to project complexity and creates value rather than administrative burden
• Customer outcomes and Professional Services economics improve measurably over time

The Director will have the authority to independently assess project health, challenge unsupported forecasts, require corrective-action plans, escalate unresolved delivery risks, and recommend changes in project leadership, staffing, governance, or commercial approach when customer, financial, or delivery outcomes are at risk.
KEY PERFORMANCE OBJECTIVES
First 12-18 Months
OBJECTIVE 1: Stabilize the Portfolio and Establish Delivery Control
First 90-120 Days
Outcome

Establish an evidence-based baseline of portfolio health and stabilize the highest-risk customer engagements.

Identify the root causes of inconsistent delivery performance across project governance, planning, staffing, solution execution, commercial structure, product dependencies, customer readiness, leadership accountability, and cross-functional decision-making.

Within the first 90 days, provide Professional Services leadership with:

• A credible portfolio health baseline
• A prioritized recovery plan for materially at-risk projects
• A PMO maturity and capability assessment
• An assessment of Project and Program Manager capability
• Clear findings on where the delivery operating model is failing
• Immediate corrective actions for the highest-risk conditions
• A sequenced roadmap for PMO stabilization and hardening
• Recommendations regarding organization, talent, process, technology, governance, and decision rights

Impact

Professional Services cannot improve what it cannot accurately see.

Establishing control of the portfolio is the first requirement for improving revenue predictability, customer confidence, delivery quality, and organizational credibility.

The Director must first establish truth, stop deterioration, and stabilize critical engagements before attempting broader transformation.
How

• Conduct structured reviews of active projects and programs
• Validate project plans, contractual commitments, milestones, financial forecasts, staffing, dependencies, risks, decisions, and customer readiness
• Identify projects whose reported health is not supported by evidence
• Establish temporary recovery governance for distressed engagements
• Define clear intervention thresholds and escalation paths
• Require time-bound corrective-action plans for materially at-risk projects
• Provide direct leadership or executive intervention where immediate stabilization is required
• Identify systemic patterns across distressed projects rather than treating each engagement as an isolated failure
• Establish actionable portfolio-level insights and KPI dashboards that are shared upwards with the VP of Professional Services in partnership to drive change within the PMO for the benefit of our clients.

OBJECTIVE 2: Harden the PMO Operating Model and Delivery Methodology
First 6 Months
Outcome

Operationalize, adjust, and enforce a scalable Professional Services delivery operating model across the PMO.

Create a tiered methodology with required controls and differentiated governance based on engagement size, complexity, commercial structure, strategic importance, customer readiness, and delivery risk.

The methodology must support PowerPlan's range of engagement types, including:

• Enterprise implementations
• Upgrades
• SaaS migrations
• Optimization engagements
• Packaged solutions
• Fixed-fee engagements
• Time-and-materials engagements
• Large strategic programs
• Smaller or lower-complexity projects

Impact

A mature PMO is not a collection of individually managed projects or a library of templates.

It is a system of clear expectations, decision rights, operating rhythms, accountability mechanisms, and intervention thresholds that produces consistent outcomes without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.
How

• Audit the current state of methodology adoption within the first 30 days
• Identify the highest-leverage control gaps and address them first
• Establish fit-for-purpose delivery standards and required controls
• With the PowerMe methodology as the foundation, harden project lifecycle stages, stage-gate criteria, required artifacts, approval authorities, and exception processes
• Standardize project planning, financial management, risk and issue management, change control, dependency management, decision management, status reporting, escalation, and closure
• Establish clear project health definitions supported by objective evidence
• Build governance compliance into PM and Program Manager performance expectations
• Establish consequences and remediation expectations for repeated noncompliance
• Eliminate low-value process and administrative burden that does not improve decision quality or delivery outcomes
• Maintain the methodology as a living operating system informed by lessons learned, portfolio trends, customer feedback, and business needs

Methodology compliance is expected, but governance must remain proportional to project risk and complexity. The goal is execution discipline, not compliance theater.
OBJECTIVE 3: Strengthen Project Financial and Commercial Control
First 6 Months and Ongoing
Outcome

Establish consistent financial and commercial management across the Professional Services portfolio.

Ensure that each project has credible visibility into budget, effort, revenue, margin, scope position, estimate to complete, estimate at completion, change exposure, and financial risk.

Improve Professional Services revenue predictability and protect project economics through disciplined project-level financial management.
Impact

A project can appear operationally healthy while creating material financial loss.

Professional Services leadership must understand not only whether work is progressing, but whether engagements are converting backlog, protecting margin, controlling scope, and producing the expected financial outcome.
How

Partner with Professional Services Operations, Finance, Sales, and delivery leaders to establish standards for:

• Project budgets and baseline effort
• Estimate to complete
• Estimate at completion
• Revenue forecasting
• Gross-margin forecasting
• Fixed-fee burn and completion risk
• Time-and-materials performance
• Backlog conversion
• Milestone billing readiness
• Customer acceptance
• Change-order identification and conversion
• Unplanned and non-billable effort
• Write-offs and revenue leakage
• Financial variance thresholds
• Required corrective actions
• Contract and statement-of-work compliance

Require financial recovery plans when project economics move outside agreed tolerances.

Ensure that Program Managers and Project Managers understand and actively manage the commercial consequences of delivery decisions.
OBJECTIVE 4: Establish Independent Delivery Assurance
First 6 Months and Ongoing
Outcome

Create an independent project assurance capability that validates whether reported project health is supported by evidence.

Implement structured assurance for strategic, complex, newly launched, materially changed, and at-risk engagements.
Impact

Project teams frequently develop optimism bias, normalize deteriorating conditions, or delay escalation because of customer pressure, internal expectations, or incomplete information.

Independent assurance helps leadership identify risk while intervention options still exist.
How

• Establish periodic project health assessments
• Conduct deep-dive reviews of strategic and at-risk engagements
• Test the integrity of integrated plans, staffing assumptions, financial forecasts, scope position, dependencies, risks, and milestone completion
• Establish health-rating calibration across the PMO
• Conduct launch-readiness and phase-exit reviews
• Implement red-team reviews where additional challenge is warranted
• Validate recovery plans and confirm whether corrective actions are producing improvement
• Identify patterns across project failures, delays, escalations, and margin deterioration
• Ensure lessons learned result in changes to methodology, estimates, contracts, staffing, product planning, or organizational behavior

The Director must be willing to challenge a green status when the evidence indicates yellow or red.
OBJECTIVE 5: Establish Trustworthy Portfolio Data and Forecasting
First 90 Days and Ongoing
Outcome

Establish Certinia PSA, formerly FinancialForce, as the trusted system of record for Professional Services PMO portfolio data.

Ensure that project, financial, milestone, resource, utilization, forecast, risk, and health data is complete, current, consistently defined, and reliable enough to support executive decision-making.
Impact

Leadership cannot make effective decisions when project data is inconsistent, outdated, incomplete, or shaped to tell a preferred story.

Reliable data is foundational to portfolio management, financial forecasting, resource planning, customer intervention, and business accountability.
How

• Define PMO business requirements, data standards, controls, and adoption expectations
• Partner with Professional Services Operations, Finance, Salesforce administration, and technical owners on system administration and improvements
• Establish non-negotiable data entry and update standards
• Identify and remediate the most material data quality issues in the first 30 days
• Create a recurring compliance and data-quality review process
• Build or improve dashboards for Project Managers, Program Managers, Professional Services leaders, and executives
• Establish a roadmap for platform improvements aligned to PMO maturity and business growth
• Ensure that reporting definitions remain consistent across the organization
• Prevent the development of shadow systems that undermine portfolio visibility
• Require forecasts and health ratings to be supported by documented assumptions and evidence

OBJECTIVE 6: Strengthen Demand, Capacity, and Resource Management
First 6 Months and Ongoing
Outcome

Establish disciplined demand and capacity planning across the PMO.

Ensure that project commitments, projected starts, and portfolio plans are evaluated against available skills, role capacity, delivery constraints, project sequencing, and hiring lead times.
Impact

Utilization alone does not indicate whether the organization can responsibly deliver committed work.

Poor capacity planning leads to delayed starts, excessive multitasking, SME bottlenecks, unstable staffing, customer dissatisfaction, and margin deterioration.
How

• Establish role- and skill-based demand and capacity visibility
• Forecast PM and Program Manager capacity at least 90 days forward
• Identify resource constraints and key-person dependencies
• Surface shared SME and cross-functional bottlenecks
• Evaluate project start-date feasibility before commitments are finalized
• Improve resource loading and assignment continuity
• Identify the impact of unplanned work and escalations on portfolio capacity
• Establish portfolio sequencing and prioritization mechanisms
• Model scenarios when demand exceeds available capacity
• Recommend delaying, resequencing, or restaffing work when commitments cannot be responsibly delivered
• Partner with Professional Services leadership and Human Resources on hiring and workforce plans
• Evaluate where contractors, partners, or alternative delivery models may be appropriate
• Ensure capacity decisions balance utilization, delivery throughput, customer outcomes, and employee sustainability

OBJECTIVE 7: Build and Develop PMO Talent
Ongoing
Outcome

Build a high-performing Project and Program Management organization with the capability, judgment, commercial awareness, and leadership discipline required to deliver complex enterprise software engagements.

Create a culture of ownership, transparency, continuous improvement, and direct accountability.
Impact

The quality ceiling of the PMO is determined by the quality of its leaders.

Strong Project and Program Managers anticipate issues, confront difficult realities, manage customers effectively, protect project economics, and require less executive intervention.
How

• Conduct a structured skills and capability assessment within the first 60 days
• Define the competencies required for Project Managers and Program Managers
• Assess current talent against those expectations
• Establish individual development plans
• Create differentiated career paths and progression expectations
• Build formal training and case-based learning using real portfolio situations
• Establish coaching and mentoring mechanisms
• Use project retrospectives to improve judgment and execution
• Develop high-potential leaders for larger and more complex programs
• Reduce key-person dependency through cross-training and succession planning
• Address underperformance directly, promptly, and fairly
• Make recommendations regarding role alignment, performance remediation, or talent changes when required
• Build a team that can operate with increasing independence and reduced executive escalation

OBJECTIVE 8: Improve Cross-Functional Delivery Readiness and Accountability
First 6 Months and Ongoing
Outcome

Strengthen the operating interfaces among Sales, other Professional Services practices, Product, Engineering, Support, Finance, and other business functions.

Ensure that projects enter delivery with executable scope, realistic assumptions, appropriate staffing, clear ownership, and known dependencies.
Impact

Many delivery failures originate before the project begins or outside the formal control of the Project Manager.

The PMO must identify and address systemic causes of failure rather than repeatedly compensating for weak handoffs, poor estimates, ambiguous scope, product gaps, resource constraints, or slow organizational decisions.
How

• Establish delivery-readiness criteria before project initiation
• Improve sales-to-delivery handoff
• Strengthen estimate validation and delivery assumptions
• Establish clear ownership for product gaps, defects, integrations, customer dependencies, data readiness, and scope ambiguities
• Define cross-functional decision and escalation mechanisms
• Establish response-time expectations for critical blockers
• Track dependency age, decision age, and recurring causes of project delay
• Escalate unresolved organizational blockers with clear business impact
• Feed project lessons into estimation, contracting, product roadmaps, solution design, implementation planning, and customer-readiness requirements
• Create transparency regarding which functions or conditions are driving portfolio performance
• Ensure accountability extends beyond the Project Manager when root causes sit elsewhere in the operating model

OBJECTIVE 9: Provide Selective Executive Sponsorship to Strategic Customer Programs
Ongoing
Outcome

Provide executive sponsorship to a limited number of PowerPlan's most strategically important, complex, or highest-risk customer programs.

Build senior customer relationships, improve executive alignment, and intervene when obstacles require leadership beyond the project team.

Establish a scalable executive-sponsorship model for the wider strategic-account portfolio rather than making the PMO Director the primary escalation point for every major customer.
Impact

Large enterprise customers expect visible senior engagement.

Effective executive sponsorship builds customer trust, enables difficult conversations, accelerates decisions, and improves the probability of successful outcomes, references, renewals, and expansion.
How

• Personally sponsor approximately three to five strategic or materially at-risk programs, depending on complexity
• Establish an executive-sponsorship framework for other strategic accounts
• Participate in major governance reviews and project milestones
• Build relationships with customer executives, particularly within the office of the CFO
• Validate that project objectives remain aligned with customer business outcomes
• Intervene rapidly when executive decisions, expectation resets, or relationship repair are required
• Ensure that executive sponsorship does not substitute for effective project leadership
• Transition stabilized programs back to normal governance when direct executive involvement is no longer required

OBJECTIVE 10: Align PMO Strategy to Professional Services and Company Objectives
Ongoing
Outcome

Ensure that the PMO's work remains directly connected to Professional Services' strategic and financial objectives.

Translate Professional Services and company strategy into operating priorities, governance decisions, workforce requirements, technology investments, and measurable portfolio outcomes.

Represent PMO performance, risks, improvement priorities, and investment needs to senior leadership with clarity, candor, and confidence.
Impact

A PMO that optimizes internal process metrics without improving customer, financial, or strategic outcomes creates activity without value.

The PMO must operate as a business leadership function, not a reporting organization.
How

• Establish a monthly Professional Services portfolio review
• Connect delivery metrics to revenue, margin, customer outcomes, retention, scalability, SaaS adoption, and company priorities
• Develop and maintain a PMO transformation roadmap
• Translate methodology, talent, analytics, and technology investments into business value
• Bring forward-looking risk analysis to executive discussions
• Identify emerging portfolio trends before they become material business problems
• Present difficult realities without minimizing risk or overstating confidence
• Clearly articulate decisions, tradeoffs, options, and recommended actions
• Establish baselines within the first 60 days and agree with the Vice President of Professional Services on quantified 6-, 12-, and 18-month improvement targets

OBJECTIVE 11: Establish Portfolio-Level Insight and Executive KPI Reporting
First 90 Days and Ongoing
Outcome

Establish a concise set of portfolio-level KPIs and executive dashboards that make delivery, financial, portfolio, and customer health visible at a glance.

Produce trustworthy, decision-ready insight that is shared upward with the Vice President of Professional Services and used, in partnership, to drive change within the PMO for the benefit of our customers.
Impact

Leadership acts on what it can see. Without a shared, reliable view of portfolio performance, decisions are delayed, risks surface late, and improvement cannot be measured.

A well-designed KPI and reporting layer turns raw project data into a management instrument that focuses attention, exposes trends early, and creates a common basis for accountability and investment decisions.
How

• Define a focused set of portfolio KPIs spanning delivery predictability, financial performance, portfolio health, customer outcomes, and operating discipline
• Establish clear, consistent definitions and calculation standards for each metric so reporting means the same thing across the organization
• Build executive dashboards that present portfolio-level insight at a glance while allowing drill-down to program and project detail
• Source metrics directly from Certinia PSA to preserve a single, trusted system of record
• Establish a regular reporting cadence and share results upward with the VP of Professional Services and other senior stakeholders
• Use KPI trends to prioritize interventions, target improvement efforts, and measure the impact of change over time
• Pair every metric with the decision, risk, or action it is intended to drive
• Distinguish leading indicators from lagging indicators so emerging risks are visible before they become escalations
• Continuously refine the KPI set as portfolio maturity, business priorities, and customer needs evolve

OBJECTIVE 12: Establish a Voice-of-the-Customer Loop That Drives Client Impact
First 6 Months and Ongoing
Outcome

Establish a systematic mechanism for capturing client feedback across the engagement lifecycle and converting it into concrete changes in how the PMO delivers.

Ensure that client sentiment, expectations, and outcomes are visible to Professional Services leadership and actively used to prioritize improvement.
Impact

Delivery quality is ultimately judged by the client, not by internal process metrics. A PMO that cannot hear its customers cannot improve for them.

A disciplined feedback loop turns individual client experiences into portfolio-wide learning, strengthening retention, references, and expansion.
How

• Establish structured client feedback at key milestones, phase exits, and project close, not only at the point of escalation
• Capture executive-sponsor and steering-committee sentiment for strategic accounts
• Define a consistent measure of client health and satisfaction that can be tracked across the portfolio
• Route client feedback into methodology, estimation, staffing, and product decisions rather than treating it as anecdote
• Close the loop with clients on what changed as a result of their input
• Identify systemic drivers of client dissatisfaction and address root causes rather than symptoms
• Share client-impact insight upward with the VP of Professional Services to inform priorities and investment
• Use client outcomes, references, and renewals as leading indicators of delivery excellence

OBJECTIVE 13: Lead Change Enablement and Sustain Adoption
First 6 Months and Ongoing
Outcome

Ensure that new delivery standards, governance, and behaviors are genuinely adopted in daily practice, not merely published.

Build the stakeholder alignment, communication, and reinforcement needed for PMO change to endure.
Impact

Most transformation efforts fail not in design but in adoption. Standards that are not lived produce no improvement.

Durable change requires visible leadership, clear expectations, and consistent reinforcement across Project Managers, Program Managers, and cross-functional partners.
How

• Develop a clear change narrative that connects new ways of working to client, financial, and team outcomes
• Engage Project Managers, Program Managers, and cross-functional partners as participants in change rather than recipients of it
• Sequence change to avoid overload and build early, visible wins
• Define and track adoption measures, not merely rollout completion
• Coach leaders and teams through the behaviors the new operating model requires
• Reinforce adoption through performance expectations, recognition, and consistent follow-through
• Identify and remove barriers that make the right behaviors harder than the old ones
• Partner with the VP of Professional Services to model and sponsor change from the top

SUCCESS MEASURES

The Director will establish baselines and improvement targets across a balanced PMO scorecard.

Measures may include:
Delivery Predictability

• Milestone attainment
• Schedule variance
• Forecast completion-date accuracy
• Project aging
• Recovery-plan effectiveness
• Percentage of projects with credible integrated plans
• Percentage of projects delivering against committed outcomes

Financial Performance

• Professional Services revenue forecast accuracy
• Project gross-margin performance
• Estimate-at-completion variance
• Backlog conversion
• Change-order identification and conversion
• Fixed-fee completion risk
• Write-offs and revenue leakage
• Unplanned non-billable effort

Portfolio Health

• Accuracy and consistency of project health ratings
• Risk and issue aging
• Decision turnaround time
• Dependency aging
• Frequency and duration of executive intervention
• Percentage of materially at-risk projects
• Rate of projects returning to controlled execution

Customer Outcomes

• Customer satisfaction at meaningful milestones
• Executive sponsor confidence
• Time to value
• Customer readiness and adoption
• Referenceability
• Renewal and expansion readiness

Operating Discipline

• Forecast timeliness and accuracy
• Certinia data completeness and quality
• Governance adherence
• Stage-gate exception rates
• Resource-plan accuracy
• Time-entry compliance
• Corrective-action closure

Talent and Organizational Health

• Project and Program Manager capability improvement
• Leadership bench strength
• Internal promotions
• Regrettable attrition
• Performance remediation
• Key-person dependency reduction
• PMO capacity relative to portfolio demand

ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP

The Director will assess and recommend the PMO structure, roles, spans of control, and enabling capabilities required to execute the mandate.

This may include capabilities such as:

• Program Management
• Project Management
• Portfolio analytics
• Delivery assurance
• Methodology and governance
• PSA administration and reporting
• Resource management
• Project recovery leadership
• Customer-program governance

The Director is expected to work through leaders and systems rather than becoming the permanent owner of every escalation or distressed project.

Qualifications

Leadership and Transformation Experience

• 10 or more years of progressive leadership experience in project-driven organizations such as enterprise software, consulting, Professional Services, systems integration, or technology outsourcing
• Demonstrated success leading a PMO turnaround, realignment, or material capability transformation
• Proven experience managing a portfolio of concurrent enterprise software implementation or Professional Services engagements
• Accountability for customer, revenue, margin, delivery, and portfolio outcomes
• Experience leading and developing Project Managers and Program Managers
• Experience establishing delivery methodology, governance, assurance, and accountability frameworks
• Demonstrated ability to diagnose systemic delivery problems and distinguish among methodology, talent, leadership, commercial, capacity, product, and customer-readiness causes
• Experience recovering complex, operationally or financially distressed customer programs
• Demonstrated ability to make difficult portfolio, staffing, customer, and performance decisions

Professional Services Commercial Acumen

• Strong understanding of Professional Services economics
• Experience with revenue forecasting, project gross margin, estimate to complete, estimate at completion, backlog conversion, change control, and revenue leakage
• Experience managing fixed-fee and time-and-materials engagements
• Ability to connect delivery decisions to financial outcomes
• Experience identifying and correcting financially distressed engagements
• Understanding of contractual commitments, statements of work, acceptance criteria, milestone billing, and change-order processes

PMO Methodology and Operations

• Demonstrated ability to select, tailor, implement, and sustain project and program management practices across complex enterprise software engagements
• Experience creating tiered governance based on project risk and complexity
• Experience establishing independent delivery assurance
• Experience building and enforcing project planning, financial management, scope management, risk management, change control, escalation, and status reporting standards
• Ability to simplify or eliminate low-value process
• Experience with portfolio-level governance across at least 50 concurrent projects
• Strong understanding of resource management, demand planning, capacity constraints, and project sequencing
• Experience owning or optimizing a Professional Services Automation platform
• Certinia PSA, formerly FinancialForce, experience is strongly preferred

Enterprise Software Delivery Knowledge

• Strong understanding of enterprise software implementation lifecycles
• Familiarity with configuration, data conversion, integrations, testing, cutover, training, customer readiness, deployment, and adoption
• Ability to distinguish project management failures from solution, product, technical, commercial, or customer-readiness failures
• Experience working in complex enterprise technology ecosystems
• SaaS migration experience is preferred
• Experience with ERP, accounting, tax, financial-management, utility, or office-of-the-CFO solutions is preferred

Talent and Performance Leadership

• Experience assessing organizational capability and designing PMO team structures
• Demonstrated success developing Project Managers and Program Managers
• Ability to identify high-potential leaders and accelerate their development
• Willingness and ability to address underperformance directly and promptly
• Experience reducing key-person risk and building succession depth
• Ability to create a culture of ownership, transparency, constructive challenge, and continuous improvement

Strategic and Cross-Functional Capability

• Ability to develop strategy and translate it into operational execution
• Ability to operate across Sales, Finance, Product, Engineering, Support, Customer Success, and Professional Services
• Demonstrated success improving cross-functional handoffs and delivery readiness
• Ability to manage through influence regardless of reporting relationships
• Ability to identify organizational incentives or behaviors that undermine delivery
• Experience making tradeoffs when demand exceeds capacity
• Ability to connect PMO priorities to company strategy, financial objectives, and customer outcomes

Communication and Decision-Making

• Exceptional verbal, written, analytical, and visual communication skills
• Equally comfortable engaging customers, executives, functional leaders, and delivery teams
• Ability to translate portfolio data and risk into clear business language
• Willingness to communicate difficult realities directly and constructively
• Ability to challenge unsupported assumptions, forecasts, status ratings, and commitments
• Makes timely, evidence-based decisions under pressure
• Distinguishes reversible decisions from consequential decisions requiring broader alignment
• Maintains composure and accountability during customer or delivery crises
• Brings recommendations, options, tradeoffs, and required decisions-not merely status updates

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent professional experience
• PMP, PgMP, PRINCE2, or comparable certification
• Experience in energy, utilities, accounting, tax, ERP, or office-of-the-CFO software
• Certinia PSA and Salesforce experience
• Experience supporting SaaS transformation or migration programs
• Experience in a private-equity-backed or highly performance-oriented operating environment
• Experience applying Lean, constraint-management, or continuous-improvement principles
• Experience with organizational change management
• Experience leading distributed or global delivery organizations

LEADERSHIP CHARACTERISTICS

The successful candidate will:

• Establish truth before prescribing solutions
• Focus on outcomes rather than activity
• Create clarity where accountability is ambiguous
• Be willing to confront poor performance and weak execution
• Avoid adding process when stronger leadership or decisions are required
• Balance rigor with pragmatism
• Build systems that reduce dependency on individual heroics
• Lead from the field, coaching and working alongside the team rather than directing from a distance
• Protect customer relationships without avoiding difficult conversations
• Challenge unrealistic commitments before they become delivery failures
• Develop others rather than becoming the permanent solution to every problem
• Operate with urgency without creating unnecessary chaos
• Demonstrate high integrity, sound judgment, and clear ownership

THE LEADERSHIP MANDATE

PowerPlan is not seeking someone to administer the existing PMO.

We are seeking a delivery executive who can establish control, rebuild and harden the operating model, elevate the capability of the team, strengthen commercial and operational discipline, and make predictable execution the norm.

Above all, we are seeking an executive operator and coach on the field-a leader who gets into the work with the team to get things done, not one who directs from afar.

PowerPlan is an EOE

Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice

Please note that this is a hybrid role that involves a combination of onsite work from our corporate office as well as work from home. While we strive to accommodate flexible working arrangements when sensible, there will be times when onsite work is required. This could include scheduled office days, team meetings, client meetings, or special events.