Director, Project Management Excellence

GSK has an inspiring ambition: by uniting science, technology and talent we aim to positively impact the health of 2.5 billion people over the next ten years. We will get ahead of disease together with our R&D approach of focusing on the science of the immune system, human genetics and advanced technologies, such as functional genomics and AI/ML.

Job Purpose:

The Pipeline Project Management organisation is responsible for the integration of pipeline project strategies into global project plans, the optimization of the project critical path, and enables optimal and efficient execution.

The R&D organisation is driving a sustained step change to deliver an acceleration of current performance, and a broader systemic cultural and capability change (and its long-term sustainability) will be evident in how the PPM organisation is able to respond to this expectation.

We want PPM to become more and more strategic, to understand deeper the critical paths and to challenge and pressure test the assumptions and the proposals of the team to ensure we take smart risks and assess how we can deliver faster.

We are looking for a motivated and energetic leader whose full focus will be on further developing new and maintaining existing training and capabilities within our PPM organization in GSK R&D to meet the above expectations.

Key Responsibilities:

This role will provide YOU the opportunity to lead key activities to progress YOUR career, these responsibilities include some of the following.

In this role, under the guidance of the Head of PPM Capabilities, you will be:

• Partnering with PM Advisors to significantly enhance proficiency levels for the discipline of Pipeline Project Management. This will include a focus on matrix leadership, drug/vaccines development knowledge and technical skills.

• Developing and maintaining the PPM capability development plan.

• Implementing a Strategic Capabilities Framework and developing associated assessment process (tools/ training) to ensure consistent benchmarking globally.

• Designing, and implementing associated training materials and tools to ensure materials reflect external best in class knowledge of Pipeline Project Management.

• Partnering with key stakeholders to ensure the new behaviors and tools are embedded across PPM, working closely with the PPM Leadership Team and Medicines/Vaccines Development Leaders to reinforce delineated roles and accountabilities.

• Ensuring the deployment, visibility, and communication of effective learning methods e.g. Keep Growing campus, LinkedIn Learning, bite size learning, etc.

• Actively evaluating programs and activities to drive continuous improvement. Driving the development of appropriate measures for defined interventions to ensure that programs deliver the required strategic change.

• Performing external benchmarking to ensure the bar is set at the highest level. Bringing learnings into the organization to drive world-class performance standards.

• Establishing and leading a mechanism to periodically drive gap analysis and assessment of organisational capability needs - utilizing key performance indicators and feedback as a means of assessment. This should include intelligence gathering of future industry trends that will inform the future required capability profiles across Development.

• Acting as a strategic partner to PPM’s leadership to diagnose strategic capability gaps; providing solutions, share best practice and leverage available resources.

• Build a strong partnership with the DDAP team to ensure we have the best tools and processes in place to maximize the PPM performance.

• Ensure the embedding of effective knowledge management by championing an open learning culture that identifies and communicates key learnings within and across functions – these learnings should be aligned to organizational objectives.

Why you?

Basic Qualifications:

We are looking for professionals with these required skills to achieve our goals:

• Advanced degree in life science or business management areas

• 7 years + direct experience in successful pharmaceutical project management across multiple phases of research and development (Candidate selection through phase 4), with timeline, management, and budgetary responsibility

• 5 years + experience with project management tools such as Planisware and/or MS Project, and computer proficiency (advanced knowledge of MS-Office applications required including Word, PowerPoint, Excel)

Preferred Qualifications:

If you have the following characteristics, it would be a plus: