Global Senior Program Director, HCM

WPP is the creative transformation company. We use the power of creativity to build better futures for our people, planet, clients, and communities.

Working at WPP means being part of a global network of more than 115,000 accomplished people in 110 countries. WPP has headquarters in New York, London and Singapore and a corporate presence in major markets worldwide.

We create transformative ideas and outcomes for our clients through an integrated offer of communications, experience, commerce, and technology.

WPP and our award-winning agencies work with most of the world's biggest companies and organisations – from Ford, Unilever and P&G to Google, HSBC, and the UN. Our clients include 61 of the FTSE 100, 307 of the Fortune Global 500, all 30 of the Dow Jones 30 and 62 of the NASDAQ 100. WPP are the leader in the Bloomberg Gender Equality Index and 20th in the FTSE 100 rankings for Women on Boards.

 

Why we're hiring:

At WPP, our talented people, enabled by technology, are at the heart of everything we do. The WPP People team is undergoing a significant transformation to modernize ways of working, shifting to Workday HCM and driving automation to digitise the colleague experience. As part of this transformation journey the Global HCM People Team are initiating a search to find the an  individual to become a leader of our team.

 

What you'll be doing:

WPP is seeking a Global Senior Program Director for Workday HCM to lead the internal program delivery team, wider WPP internal stakeholders and external partners and vendors, ensuring deliverables are completed according to measures of quality, time, and scope. Reporting to the Global Head of People Transformation, this role will be responsible for leading program progress, ensuring executive level status updates, decision logs and RAID items are detailed and ready for Steerco, executive and program reporting and decision-making. The role requires a collaborative, well-rounded global business and IT program management expert, with extensive experience in leading global HCM and/or related HR platform rollouts.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Lead, through a PMO matrixed framework, multi-disciplinary globally distributed teams in the IT and People function, to successfully execute complex and simultaneous projects within the Workday HCM portfolio.
• Establish goals, tasks, dependencies, target dates & timelines, activities, owners of tasks/actions, and status at a programmatic level within the team.
• Be adept at working in both an Agile and a traditional Project Management environment, depending on the program needs.
• Be the right hand for the business team and anticipate their needs to further the project’s success.
• Lead and facilitate meetings and communicate updates to program stakeholders (project team, external clients, senior management and the executive team) as needed.
• Oversee the team on preparation and publishing of weekly, monthly and quarterly program reports/status for the internal team and management to be informed of the project’s health (i.e., open/at risk/completed items).
• Own organization of program onboarding across the cross-functional team to ensure consistency across local and global program regions.
• Provide consultation on deeper analysis and works with relevant teams to develop briefs for senior management project escalations.
• Drive continuous improvements for the team’s delivery practices, processes and procedures.
• Coach the team as needed in best practices relative to project methodology.
• Ensure the committed work is delivered to specification, quality, scope and time.
• Champion an iterative planning process; work with the team to define the work that will be packaged into releases and delivered.
• Partner with senior Technical Leaders to create and manage technical plans, ascertained by working with the project team to define the deliverables that will be developed in each release of the product.

 

What you'll need:

• Ability to manage multiple program workstreams and deliverables, identifying risks, issues, and dependencies among projects.
• Proactively identifies, tracks, and mitigates project risks and issues, escalating appropriately.
• Communicates calmly, concisely and generates confidence, even in crises/conflicts.
• Ensures team members take personal accountability for deliverables and projects, engaging in all aspects of team assignments.
• Leads the development, agreement of measurement/success criteria and maintenance for program evaluation ensuring objectives and metrics.
• Leads Post Pr