Director - Demand Management Transformation & Operating Model (Chicago)

Position: Director – Demand Management Transformation & Operating Model

Key Skills: Business & Technology Transformation Leadership, Demand Management, Process Redesign, Organizational Change Management

Experience: Min 10+ Years experience

Location: NYC / Princeton, NJ /Boston, MA/ Dallas, TX / Chicago, IL / Santa Clara, CA/ SFO,CA

We at Coforge are seeking “Director – Demand Management Transformation & Operating Model” with the following skill-set:

Role overview

We are seeking a senior Transformation Lead to design and activate a unified demand-management front end for a complex technology organization. The successful candidate will combine process transformation, organizational change, design thinking and agile delivery expertise with strong business and technology fluency.

This person will lead diverse business and technology stakeholders through the definition of a simpler, consistent and outcome-led way to qualify, shape and route demand before specialist assessment and delivery capacity is committed.

The role requires a confident facilitator and practical change leader who can bring together stakeholders with different priorities, established practices and ways of working, while preserving valuable existing ideas and driving the group toward one common operating model. The Transformation Lead will ensure that business needs shape technology decisions, rather than allowing tools or proposed solutions to define the problem prematurely.

Key responsibilities

Lead the transformation

• Establish a clear vision, design principles and delivery plan for the future demand-management front end.
• Lead the transition from fragmented intake and assessment mechanisms to a common, qualification-led approach.
• Maintain focus on the target outcome while managing competing stakeholder perspectives and priorities.
• Translate complex organizational challenges into a simple, executable operating model.
• Drive decisions, resolve ambiguity and maintain momentum across the engagement.

Redesign processes and decision points

• Assess current demand-intake, qualification, ideation and initial-assessment practices.
• Identify process fragmentation, inconsistent decision criteria, premature solutioning and unnecessary use of specialist capacity.
• Design a common qualification discipline that can support both business-led and technology-led opportunities.
• Define minimum-validity criteria, decision gates, routing logic and exception paths.
• Establish clear boundaries between qualification, structured ideation, assessment and prioritization.
• Test the proposed model against representative demand scenarios and refine it based on practical evidence.

Lead people and organizational change

• Engage stakeholders across business functions, technology teams, product organizations and enterprise services.
• Build alignment among stakeholders with different operating models, terminology and delivery methods.
• Facilitate workshops that move participants from discussion to clear decisions and commitments.
• Create stakeholder ownership of the future model without allowing the design to fragment into multiple competing processes.
• Define roles, accountabilities, governance cadence and decision rights.
• Develop the adoption and transition approach required to move from existing practices to the new operating model.

Connect business needs to technology enablement

• Help stakeholders articulate the underlying business condition, outcome and evidence before selecting a technology response.
• Challenge solution-led requests and reframe them around the business need and intended outcome.
• Convert business requirements and operating decisions into clear functional requirements for technology teams.
• Ensure the future process can be embedded into current systems and tools without allowing those tools to constrain the business design.
• Work effectively with architecture, product, engineering and platform teams during design and implementation planning.
• Produce an implementation-ready backlog for subsequent configuration, integration and deployment.

Apply design thinking and agile delivery

• Use human-centered and design-thinking techniques to understand existing work, stakeholder needs and process friction.
• Develop and test hypotheses through working sessions, prototypes and representative demand cases.
• Apply agile principles to refine the operating model iteratively while maintaining a clear target state.
• Prioritize practical progress and adoption over documentation-heavy process design.
• Create reusable artefacts, playbooks and decision frameworks that teams can apply consistently.

Expected outcomes

The Transformation Lead will be accountable for producing:

• A common future-state demand-front-end model
• A qualification framework and minimum-validity rubric
• Clear criteria for when structured ideation is required
• Defined decision outcomes and routing logic
• Roles, accountabilities and governance arrangements
• A tested operating playbook
• Functional requirements for integration into the system of record
• An implementation and adoption backlog
• Knowledge transfer to designated business and technology owners

The successful engagement will result in better-formed demand reaching assessment, clearer business and technology ownership, reduced premature solutioning, and a consistent basis for progressing, shaping, returning or stopping opportunities.

Required experience

• Significant experience leading business and technology transformation initiatives.
• Demonstrated expertise in process redesign, target operating models and organizational change.
• Strong experience facilitating senior, cross-functional and cross-cultural stakeholder groups.
• Proven ability to create alignment and drive decisions in complex or federated organizations.
• Experience applying design thinking, human-centered design or service-design methods.
• Experience working in agile, product-oriented or hybrid delivery environments.
• Strong understanding of technology-demand, portfolio, product or investment-management processes.
• Ability to translate business problems into operating requirements and technology implications.
• Experience moving initiatives from discovery and design into implementation-ready plans.
• Strong executive communication, workshop facilitation and written-communication skills.

Preferred experience

• Experience working with enterprise technology organizations, CTO or CIO offices, enterprise architecture, IT business-partnering or technology portfolio-management teams.
• Familiarity with demand-management, portfolio-management or product-management platforms.
• Experience working across different delivery models, including product, agile, waterfall and enterprise-platform environments.
• Familiarity with systems such as Clarity, Jira or similar workflow and portfolio-management platforms.
• Experience designing decision frameworks, qualification rubrics or intake and governance mechanisms.
• Understanding of how AI and automation could eventually support structured qualification and decision processes.

Leadership profile

The successful candidate will be:

• Outcome-led: Keeps the engagement focused on business outcomes and an executable future state.
• Decisive: Moves groups from debate into decisions without disregarding legitimate stakeholder input.
• Collaborative: Builds ownership across business and technology teams.
• Pragmatic: Simplifies complexity and avoids unnecessary process or documentation.
• Curious: Understands how work happens before proposing how it should change.
• Technology-fluent: Can engage credibly with architecture, product and engineering teams without becoming technology-led.
• Change-oriented: Understands that process redesign succeeds only when roles, behaviors and incentives change with it.
• Culturally adaptive: Works effectively across functions, geographies and different organizational cultures.
• Implementation-minded: Produces assets that delivery and technology teams can use, not only strategic recommendations.

What distinguishes the right candidate

The ideal candidate is neither a traditional project manager nor a narrowly focused process analyst. This person is a senior transformation practitioner who can connect strategy, process, people and technology.

The right candidate can enter a complex environment, understand the work quickly, establish trust, challenge entrenched assumptions, preserve useful existing practices and guide diverse stakeholders toward one practical and commonly owned operating model. Above all, this person understands that business needs and outcomes should shape technology decisions, not the other way around.