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.

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