Sr Director, Enterprise PMO Lead

Company Description

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks® everything starts and ends with our mission:

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.

Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we’re looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

FLEXWORK is an employee-centric reimagining of how we work. We built FLEXWORK based on employee feedback – it is about flexibility, trust, and choice whenever possible. It’s been a journey of disruption that has yielded the best of our values. We offer as much flexibility as possible, and choices that enable you to be most productive, including benefits that meet your needs and learning opportunities that you feel passionate about.

Our Approach to Work

At Palo Alto Networks, we believe in the power of collaboration and value in-person interactions. This is why our employees generally work from the office three days per week, leaving two days for choice and flexibility to work where you feel most effective. This setup fosters casual conversations, problem-solving, and trusted relationships. While details may evolve, our goal is to create an environment where innovation thrives, with office-based teams coming together three days a week to collaborate and thrive, together!

Job Description

Your Career

This leadership role is responsible for managing and directing the Enterprise Wide Program Management Function. The role will lead a team of 30-40 Enterprise Wide Program Managers that drive strategic programs across the organization. These enterprise wide projects involve stakeholders across Finance, Sales, HR, Product and other teams - e.g. Quote to Cash, optimizing New Product Introduction, amongst others.

The role includes strategy Innovation (project intake, prioritization, resource allocation, and portfolio status reporting), driving effective communication and engagement across the functions.

Exceptional communication and relationship-building skills must be exercised by this position at all levels of the organization. The candidate should possess inherent leadership skills, strong project management expertise, project portfolio insight, ability to create strategic content and executive level presentations for strategy, capabilities, and technology.

Your Impact

Strategic Planning

• Understanding of the Business Problem we are solving 
• Structuring of high level work blocks needed to solve the problem - not just the IT work but holistic blocks of work needed to solve the business problem
• Establishing interdependencies across the work - across the organization
• Establishing the major milestones and linking them to real business outcomes - e.g. value delivered, business metrics impacted
• Understanding of the end user impact and thinking about the elements required to institutionalize

Execution focused on Problem Solving & conflict resolution

• Ability to take complex big blocks of work and then structure into sprints and finer tasks
• Relentless passion to own the overall delivery of the project and ability to hustle through the entire organization (beyond just IT) to get things done
• Problem Solving / first principles 
  • Work past obstacles and think through creative solutions to ensure there major milestones are met
  • Go beyond just tracking and reporting of bad news but really internalize the issues that might impact milestones and creatively thinking about options to show progress while mitigating risks in the back end
  • Proactively recognizing risks and trying to resolve vs. simply escalating
• Communication across stakeholders 
  • Simplified communication in Steering Sessions with senior audiences
  • Escalating program level risks with the right audiences in a manner that facilitates problem resolutions - i.e. proactively thinking through areas that might be impacted and facilitating conversations in a structured manner to solve the key issues
  • Ability to have 1:1s across the organization (beyond just IT) to empathize with constraints but also influence
• Technical knowledge & documentation
  • Willingness to learn about the broader technical solution to solve the problems
  • Willingness to participate in sprints and challenge the developers and push the thinking on technical solutions
  • Familiarity with agile methodologies and ability to run sprints
  • Understanding of what is good for 
    • User Acceptance Test plan
    • Business Requirement Document
    • Technical Requirements document