Business Program Manager

Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. 

This role is a part of the Learning & Organization Capability (LOC) organization and specifically a part of the Business Management & Operations (BMO) team, where we are empowering all employees to do their best work by activating learning and developing leaders and employees in all parts of the organization. If this sounds exciting to you and you are experienced in Business Management & Operations, Demand Planning, and Business Program Management we have an exciting opportunity for you on the BMO team. We are seeking experienced professionals with an important combination of skills and experience to support the LOC mission. This Business Program Manager, plays a key role in directly supporting driving towards the organization’s strategic objectives through: 

• Business Management & Operations: Drive various business management processes such as annual planning, budget management, forecasting, & headcount management. Provide expertise in business operations e.g., managing key Rhythm of Business (ROB) activities including running recurring events such as org-level all-togethers/summits, portfolio reviews, and providing readiness material to support the ROB. 
• Demand Planning: Report-out on and align with key stakeholders on factors that influence learning consumption to improve forecasting accuracy. Understand org and leadership team level strategic objectives to provide recommendations on achieving optimal demand targets across the learning portfolio. Collaborate with key leaders to influence demand outcomes.  
• Program Management: Drive adherence to program/project management best practices. End to end ownership of special projects/programs to support the various business management & operations processes. This can include day-to-day business operations and org-wide events such as org-wide all-togethers, learning summits, and more. 

Responsibilities

Business Program Planning and Design  

• Performs program landscape research and analysis (e.g., internal and/or external market, sales, delivery), forecasting, and examines business trends (e.g., customer feedback and expectations) to identify audience size and program scope, and stay current, agile, and competitive. Understands overall business goals, objectives, and strategies, as well as short- and long-term business priorities. Understands and identifies current program risks, impact, and mitigation plans. 
• Identifies and scopes opportunities to develop new programs and improve current ones. Identifies and provides solutions to root problems (e.g., root-cause analysis), defines the program strategy, gathers program requirements, identifies resource needs, creates the project plan and targets, and works across teams to align on the plan of record. Improves operations of existing programs by applying industry methodology, defining complex program issues, assessing various scenarios, and selecting the optimal scenario to resolve issues. Drives clarity in complex program issues and strives for simplification.  
• Works with cross-functional (e.g., organizational, product, business) stakeholders (e.g., Engineering) to design compliant, complex programs from initiation to delivery with minimal coaching. Produces collateral (e.g., proposals, strategy walking deck, internal and external pitch content) to incorporate stakeholder needs and ensure the business objectives are met.  
• Defines and tracks the success criteria and performance metrics (e.g., Objectives and Key Results [OKRs] and Key Performance Indicators [KPIs]), such as quality, adoption, usage, impact, effectiveness) for the program. 

Buisness Program Excellence and Execution  

• Defines and executes on landing and communication plans, such as the target audience(s) and communication strategy. Leads the rhythm of business (ROB) during plan execution to ensure participants and stakeholders are communicating and responding according to the necessary cadence. Works across teams (e.g., Landing Design, Engineering, Supply Chain, Finance, Technical Program Management) to ensure all program requirements are understood and can be met.  
• Evangelizes complex programs to stakeholders, partners, and customers to gain buy in. Leverages data and performance metrics (e.g., Objectives and Key Results [OKRs] and Key Performance Indicators [KPIs]) to demonstrate the value