The Senior Program/Project Director is accountable for the successful delivery of one of the organization’s largest and most strategically critical customer programs, typically ranging from $250M to $500M in scope. This role owns overall program success, including customer trust, operational execution, financial performance, margin protection, risk management, and long-term growth credibility.
Serving as the primary face to the customer after kickoff, this leader partners closely with Sales, Commercial, Solution Development, Finance, Legal, and Operations to strengthen the broader customer relationship and ensure alignment from pursuit through delivery. While some pre-award decisions may already be established for the program, this role has full lifecycle ownership—from solution shaping and customer commitments through execution, commissioning, closeout, and lessons learned.
This role requires a leader who can operate at both strategic and execution levels—building executive customer relationships, driving daily accountability, removing barriers, managing escalations, and providing program leadership and oversight to assigned Senior Project Managers and cross-functional teams. The role is critical to establishing the organization’s credibility as a trusted partner for enterprise-scale, mission-critical customer programs.
Tasks and Qualifications:Key Responsibilities:
Enterprise Program Leadership:
- Lead the planning, governance, execution, and delivery of a single enterprise-scale customer project ranging from $250M to $500M in total scope.
- Influence the program across the full lifecycle, including pre-award solution shaping, scope definition, risk identification, pricing assumptions, customer commitments, execution planning, delivery, commissioning, closeout, and lessons learned.
- Serve as the senior accountable project leader for overall program success, including scope, schedule, budget, quality, safety, customer satisfaction, commercial outcomes, and margin protection.
- Balance executive-level oversight with hands-on involvement in execution details, issue resolution, change control, and daily/weekly program management cadence.
Complex Project Execution & Governance:
- Establish disciplined program governance, including executive steering routines, customer governance, escalation paths, decision forums, and clear accountability across workstreams.
- Direct integrated program planning, including schedules, work breakdown structures, resource plans, budget forecasts, risk registers, dependency maps, and recovery plans.
- Drive hands-on execution by proactively resolving risks, constraints, scope changes, contractual issues, customer conflicts, and delivery gaps while providing oversight and escalation support to assigned Senior Project Managers.
Customer & Executive Stakeholder Management:
- Serve as the primary customer-facing leader after kickoff, building trusted relationships with senior operations, supply chain, technology, finance, procurement, and C-suite stakeholders.
- Represent the organization in customer meetings, executive business reviews, steering committees, negotiations, escalations, and strategic alignment discussions.
- Align stakeholders across the full value chain and influence decisions through credibility, business acumen, data-driven analysis, executive presence, and clear communication under pressure.
Commercial, Financial & Risk Ownership:
- Own program-level financial performance, including budget management, forecasting, margin protection, cash flow awareness, change order discipline, financial risk mitigation, and executive-level reporting.
- Partner with commercial, legal, procurement, and leadership teams to support contract interpretation, claims prevention, change management, vendor performance, and customer negotiations.
- Develop mitigation and recovery strategies for schedule slippage, cost pressure, resource constraints, supplier risk, technical issues, and customer-driven scope changes.
Continuous Improvement & Organizational Capability:
- Capture lessons learned from enterprise-scale programs and translate them into improved governance, delivery models, tools, templates, and operating standards.
- Strengthen project management capability by coaching project leaders, reinforcing best practices, and modeling the leadership behaviors required for complex customer delivery.
Skills & Capabilities:
- Executive presence with the credibility to engage customer executives, internal senior leadership, steering committees, and board-level stakeholders.
- Proven ability to lead enterprise-scale, high-value, multi-year programs with significant operational, financial, technical, and customer complexity.
- Strong hands-on project leadership, with the ability to move seamlessly between strategic decision-making and detailed execution management.
- Commercial acumen and financial discipline, including budget ownership, forecasting, margin protection, change order management, cash flow awareness, and ROI focus.
- Advanced stakeholder management, negotiation, conflict resolution, and influence skills across customers, suppliers, partners, project teams, and senior leaders.
- Ability to lead through ambiguity, pressure, competing priorities, and high customer expectations while maintaining focus, accountability, and delivery discipline.
- Deep understanding of program governance, risk management, issue resolution, change management, executive escalation, and decision-making processes, with the ability to hold Senior Project Managers and workstream leaders accountable for results.
- Strong technical and operational orientation, including an understanding of complex automation, material handling, software, controls, installation, commissioning, service considerations, and the tools required to manage large cross-functional programs.
Experience & Education:
- Minimum of 15+ years of progressive project, program, or delivery leadership experience, including large-scale, complex customer programs.
- Proven track record leading enterprise-scale programs of $250M+; experience with $500M, multi-site, or multi-year engagements strongly preferred.
- Demonstrated success managing executive-level customer relationships, including senior operational, procurement, finance, technology, and C-suite stakeholders.
- Experience leading Senior Project Managers, cross-functional teams, vendors, subcontractors, and matrixed workstreams in complex delivery environments.
- Bachelor's degree in a relevant field (e.g., Project Management,, Business Administration).
- Master's degree in Business Administration, Project Management, or a related field is highly desired.
- Project Management Professional (PMP) certification is highly preferred.
- Additional certifications in project management methodologies are a plus.
