Associate Director, Strategic Project Management, Conferences Strategy & Development

About Strategic Project Management, Conferences Strategy & Development:

As a part of the Conferences Strategy & Development team, the Strategic Project Management (SPM) Center of Excellence (COE) focuses on high impact projects, ensuring a centralized approach to fully leverage our capabilities across the conferences business. This highly collaborative team helps drive forward projects to support the growth and scalability of the Global Conferences Portfolio with a primary focus on managing Key Initiative Meetings, Conference Launch Planning & Management, Strategic Roadmap Execution and Competitive Market Analysis.

About the role:

As an Associate Director of Strategic Project Management (SPM), you will be responsible for connecting with key leaders across the conference organization to centralize, prioritize, and lead initiatives to support the highest priorities of the Conferences organization. The Associate Director will play an important role in defining the strategic roadmap execution plan as we seek to double the Conferences business over the next five year. By managing Key Initiative (KI) Meetings, this individual will be a thought partner to the KI Lead to identify, structure, and solve for the most pressing strategic questions facing the Conferences business. 

Understanding the conferences business is a key pillar to success in this role. It is important for this individual to learn all functions of the Conferences business, while honing their leadership and project management skills, to effectively lead cross-functional projects and Key Initiative workstreams. This self-starter should continually seek opportunities for optimization and improvement across the Conferences business to help the organization evolve and scale effectively in a changing environment. Using a data-driven approach, this individual will push the organization to think differently and question the status quo in a way that helps evolve the business and supports our ability to meet client and business needs today and in the future. The responsibilities of this role and team will continue to evolve with the business, ensuring we remain focused on the highest impact projects. This individual will collaborate with key stakeholders across Conferences including Product, Marketing, Operations, Sales, and Business Operations to drive forward strategic initiatives. 

What you will do:

• Lead the process to deliver on our strategic roadmap execution plan by centralizing, evaluating, and prioritizing projects to support the key priorities of the Global Leadership Team (GLT).
• Establish a prioritization framework to consistently evaluate project submission to remain focused on high-impact initiatives to support the growth and scalability of the conferences business while balancing resource bandwidth. 
• Standardize the process to effectively monitor project status and success metrics to share leadership updates on a quarterly basis ensuring alignment across the conferences business. 
• Lead cross-functional projects and Key Initiative workstreams and support cross-functional project teams where required to support driving portfolio growth and our ability to scale across the global conferences portfolio
• Build trusted partnerships with team members and leaders across the organization, leveraging in office time to connect with stakeholders, learn from your peers and keep a pulse on priorities across the teams to support your success in this role
• Seek opportunities to learn and develop new skills to become a utility player across the business by expanding knowledge of all functions of the Conferences business and portfolio initiatives
• Ability to travel up to 10-15% of the time

What you will need:

• Bachelor’s Degree
• 7+ years’ experience in Project Management, Conferences, or Consulting; conference or event experience preferred
• Strong analytical skills to deliver strategies that effectively address business needs
• Exceptional collaboration skills with proven ability to build partnerships across lines of business
• Excellent oral and written communication skills; demonstrated ability to speak/write clearly and persuasively with ability to present to peers and leaders with confidence and poise
• Ability to efficiently prioritize and plan work activities in a dynamic work environment
• Demonstrated ability to adapt, implement and manage change and strive for continuous improvement
• Consistent demonstration of integrity, collaboration, no-limits mindset, objectivity and delivering results consistently
• Curious and inquisitive with exceptional problem-solving skills
• Fully competent in Microsoft Office and Google, especially Excel; strong excel and/or google sheets experience required with an ability to build and execute functions using both pivot