Assistant Director, Portfolio at Northwestern Mutual in Milwaukee, WI

The Assistant Director, Portfolio Manager is a delegate, business partner, and governance manager across groups of enterprise programs. They achieve goals through smart business partnership, business savvy, program management expertise, ability to influence without authority, and maintaining top-of-mind awareness of each assigned program in their portfolio. They understand business risk profiles and dependencies, and serve as an advisor for their portfolio.

Responsibilities

• Advise and guide the planning, development, and implementation of enterprise programs through an integrated planning process.
• Ensure visibility into, and support, the on-going health of assigned portfolio, including monitoring compliance with stated objectives (OKRs, TCO, Risk, Variations).
• Monitor key interdependencies across the assigned portfolio and advise on implementation of effective measures to mitigate risk.
• Work with program managers to solve misalignment against the enterprise roadmap or multi-year strategy.
• Maintain an ongoing operating rhythm to review portfolio, and align program leaders and EPMG partners (Business Case, Resource, Planning, Prioritization, Metrics, Delivery)
• Leverage expertise to solve for program management issues. Guide to optimized and consistent methods in line with NM program management standards.
• Monitor and recommend initiatives pause or stop based on progress, risk and leading indicators.
• Support resource management through ensuring portfolio resource demands are kept up to date.
• Support and represent assigned portfolio to senior management through top of mind knowledge of resource gaps, priorities, portfolio progress/outcomes, and capacity.

Bring Your Best! What this role needs?

• Bachelor's degree in business or related field and minimum 8 years of professional work experience to include areas such as project and portfolio management, change management, and building measurement systems
• Complex problem-solving skills, digital savvy, organizational savvy, strategic agility, process improvement,
• Extensive organizational and time management skills, with experience in resource allocation and budget management
• Demonstrated experience in managing "upward" among senior leadership
• Strong short- and long-term planning skills, coupled with ability to lead resources in response to business needs
• Experience with multiple project methodologies and supporting management tools and processes
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