Associate Specialist, Business Strategy - Strategic Portfolio Management

About Northern Trust:

Northern Trust, a Fortune 500 company, is a globally recognized, award-winning financial institution that has been in continuous operation since 1889.  

Northern Trust is proud to provide innovative financial services and guidance to the world’s most successful individuals, families, and institutions by remaining true to our enduring principles of service, expertise, and integrity. With more than 130 years of financial experience and over 22,000 partners, we serve the world’s most sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service.

Job Title: Associate Specialist, Business Strategy - Strategic Portfolio Management

Job Description:

The Strategic Portfolio Management team, in the Business Enablement group, supports Northern Trust’s Wealth Management (WM) business unit through the administration, management, and governance of its portfolio of work.

As part of its remit, the team oversees change management processes designed to ensure strategic alignment across projects, insight, and transparency into the portfolio of work, identification and management of risks and dependencies, identification of potential change impact concentration and proposed resolution, achievement of outcomes, and accountability at all levels.

We are seeking a highly skilled and proactive Strategic Portfolio Associate Specialist to help manage the business unit’s strategic project portfolio while interfacing with enterprise-level teams. Acting as an “air traffic controller,” this role ensures that projects are tracked, sequenced, and launched at the right time to maximize organizational impact. The ideal candidate will collaborate closely with business unit stakeholders, project teams, and enterprise change management to align priorities, manage dependencies, identify areas of change impact concentration, recommend potential initiative sequencing and help drive effective change management across the portfolio.

In this role, you will need to be a leader who is analytical, proactive, able to see the big picture and manage details, action-oriented, a great communicator, and comfortable driving change through influence. You will interact with Wealth Management senior leaders, Practice, Product, Change Management and Technology partners to foster an innovative and integrated environment, resulting in an optimized portfolio with clear priorities and expected outcomes.

Major Duties:

• Serve as a major point of contact for Wealth Management’s project portfolio, ensuring alignment with strategic goals.

• Gather and track project roadmaps, timelines, risks, constraints, dependencies and milestones across the project portfolio.

• Identify and oversee interdependencies between projects to minimize risks and conflicts.

• Collaborate with Business Unit and Enterprise Change Management to identify and manage organizational impacts and align with enterprise priorities.

• Identify change impact concentration, risk profile and prioritization and make recommendations on change approach or sequencing to mitigate risks. 

• Facilitate Change Management escalation discussions with Leadership and concerned teams to resolve sequencing conflicts and focus roll-out activities.

• Drive portfolio governance activities, including reporting, documentation, and adherence to established processes.

• Demonstrate a proactive and persistent approach to work, driving open items to completion consistently and independently. Escalate problem areas early and often.

Knowledge / Skills:

Required 

• Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Project Management, Change Management, or a related field (or equivalent experience).

• 5-7+ years of experience in portfolio coordination, program management, or project management roles.

• Strong understanding of project management methodologies (Agile, Waterfall, hybrid approaches).

• Adaptability to manage priorities in a dynamic, fast-paced environment.

• Proficiency with portfolio management tools such as Clarity PPM, Microsoft Project, Jira or similar.

• Exceptional organizational skills with a proven ability to manage multiple projects in a fast-paced environment.

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills for effective stakeholder management and relationship building.

• Highly flexible and adaptable to change.