EMEA Director of Delivery Assurance

Microsoft•De, DE

About The Position

Are you excited about working on the largest, most-complex consulting delivery engagements? Do you have what it takes to establish a foundation for complex, multimillion dollar global programs, leveraging AI-powered solutions to achieve 2x efficiency and ensure every challenge is met with innovation and resilience? As Microsoft’s largest customers digitally transform their business and operating models, they look to Microsoft Industry Solutions Delivery (ISD) to help achieve the change successfully and at pace. You will have the opportunity to enhance your program governance skills and experience as you build relationships with senior internal and external stakeholders, supporting some of the most complex and strategic customers across a number of industries, and collaborating with teams located in multiple locations and time zones. In ISD Delivery you will be working in an environment that empowers you to bring your best each day. You will grow professionally and personally as part of a team that cares passionately for great customer outcomes, and who strive to improve the overall customer and partner experience. Join our team of exceptional people who deliver world-class professional consulting services. Our team provides a supportive atmosphere with passion for growth, where you can earn customer confidence, trust, and loyalty by improving the overall customer and partner experience. At the same time, we put specific emphasis on work-life balance, wellbeing, and the opportunity to execute in diverse and inclusive environments. We are looking for Complex Program Activation Lead (CPAL) with a passion for delivering desired customer outcomes, who can take responsibility for driving the successful initiation, recovery, and acceleration of large-scale, complex cloud programs. This role focuses on the governance infrastructure, tools, and processes needed to quickly and successfully launch or recover a multimillion-dollar program, setting up program governance, setting up operational cadence, and managing stakeholder relationships. CPAL will serve as a trusted advisor to both internal teams and clients, ensuring that every program starts proficiently, is positioned for long-term success, and can be rapidly brought back on track when challenges arise. Creative use of artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to drive program delivery, lead program recovery, and achieve breakthrough 2x efficiency throughout the program lifecycle. This opportunity will allow you to accelerate your career growth, honing your industry and cloud expertise as well as deepening your contractual and commercial acumen. Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond. In alignment with our Microsoft values, we are committed to cultivating an inclusive work environment for all employees to positively affect our culture every day.

Requirements

Bachelor's Degree in related fields AND 7+ years of experience in program management OR equivalent experience.
Bachelor's Degree in related field AND 15+ years' experience in project management OR equivalent experience.
Project Management Professional (PMP) and Program Management Professional (PgMP) certification.
8+ years financial management experience.
Agile certification, Scrum Master, Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), or Professional Scrum Master One (PSM1) certification.
Certification in relevant industry.
Experience in creating and managing intellectual property (IP).
Experience in creating publications.
Bachelor's Degree in related field AND experience in project management OR equivalent experience.

Nice To Haves

Project Management Professional (PMP) and Program Management Professional (PgMP) certification.
8+ years financial management experience.
Agile certification, Scrum Master, Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), or Professional Scrum Master One (PSM1) certification.
Certification in relevant industry.
Experience in creating and managing intellectual property (IP).
Experience in creating publications.

Responsibilities

Champion AI-enabled Delivery Excellence: Incubate Agentic AI capabilities across the delivery lifecycle - from mobilization through lessons learned. Explore how intelligent automation and AI-augmented workflows can enhance execution on complex engagements, partnering across the organization to identify scalable patterns and shape ISD’s AI-enabled delivery roadmap.
Program Governance Setup: Establish and implement robust governance framework, tools, and processes tailored to the needs of each program, leveraging AI-driven solutions to ensure alignment with organizational goals and compliance with industry standards and best practices.
Operational Cadence Establishment: Develop and maintain a consistent rhythm of business for the program, including setting up key processes, meetings, and reporting structures to drive program progress. Utilize AI-powered tools to automate routine tasks, streamline workflows, and enhance overall program efficiency.
Stakeholder Management: Function as the primary point of contact for stakeholders, facilitating clear communication, expectation management, and conflict resolution. Ensure that all stakeholders are aligned with program objectives and timelines.
Resource Onboarding: Design and oversee the resource onboarding process to the customer environment, ensuring that all team members are equipped with the necessary tools, knowledge, and support to contribute effectively from day one. Leverage AI-driven onboarding platforms and generative AI for rapid knowledge transfer and documentation.
Program Planning and Execution: Collaborate with cross-functional teams to develop detailed program plans, including timelines, milestones, and deliverables. Ensure that all program activities are executed on time and within scope.
Risk Management: Identify potential risks and develop mitigation strategies to minimize their impact on the program. Use AI-powered predictive analytics to proactively detect and address risk factors throughout the program lifecycle, adjusting plans as needed.
Continuous Improvement: Continuously assess and refine program activation processes, incorporating lessons learned, best practices, and AI-driven process optimization to enhance efficiency and effectiveness in future programs, aiming for 2x improvement in delivery outcomes.
Reporting and Documentation: Provide regular status updates to leadership and stakeholders, including detailed reports on program progress, risks, and issues. Leverage AI automation and generative AI to accelerate reporting, maintain comprehensive documentation, and ensure timely stakeholder communication.
Program Recovery: Lead program recovery where needed, starting from a rapid assessment of challenges, leveraging AI for diagnosing root cause, partnering with technical leaders and architects, and implementing targeted turnaround strategies. Drive efficient restoration of program health and performance, aiming for achieving target outcome for the customer and sustainable success.
Leadership and Mentorship: Lead and mentor program directors, managers and other key personnel involved in the program activation process, fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and excellence.
Account Delivery Management: Manages the direction of solution deliveries and influences others to secure resources to deliver on customer contracts. Ensures delivery for customers across the delivery lifecycle including envisioning, solution development, delivery planning, cloud consumption and usage, delivery management. Leads or participates in steering committee meetings with strategic customers to discuss progress toward delivery success. Contributes to consumption activities and the setting of strategic direction for consumption based on identification of broad patterns of consumption gaps, and drives consumption for complex customers (e.g., tier 1) by identifying blockers to consumption goals and enabling customers, through internal teams, to get the full value of their purchases. Holds accountability for project delivery forecast. Collaborates with Sales to support contract setup, signature, compliance, and execution from deal approvals to invoicing and closure. Manages areas of fiscal responsibility within project portfolio, staying within budget while driving engagement profitability and risk management. Supports strategic relationships with key stakeholders in the customer portfolio, often as part of a steering committee, to ensure service delivery is on track and major issues are being anticipated, identified, and managed. Supports new customer opportunities in partnership with Sales with highly significant or global impacts for Microsoft. Communicates current view of delivery to customer executives on regular cadence, as appropriate.
Intellectual Property (IP): Leads others in the use of intellectual property (IP) by providing recommendations for improvement including submitting new IP, contributing to complex IP, and driving standardization across IP ( e.g., statements of work [SOWs], work breakdown structures [WBS] by enforcing use of processes and artifacts with team members. Structures projects considering IP reuse from the beginning.
Relationship Development: Engages senior internal and external stakeholders (e.g., Chief Executive-level executives) as a peer with deep subject matter expertise. Prevents and manages complex escalations through strategic and targeted communications with Chief Executive-level executives and delivers difficult messages as needed. Leverages brokering skills to assist other project managers in strategic communications. Collaborates with internal teams to manage overall customer relationships and plan mitigation strategies as needed. Drives customer satisfaction by representing Microsoft to senior customer stakeholders (e.g., Chief Executive-level, analyzing customer feedback, and leveraging trusted relationships with senior and executive leaders to act as the voice of the customer and ensure resolution of challenged deliveries. Manages expectations with a high level of political sensitivity by anticipating customer reactions, interpreting small signals, and taking proactive steps accordingly. Oversees the creation of Success Expectations and customer and partner experience (CPE). Adheres to project compliance standards (e.g., confidentiality, privacy) and requirements of the contract and accommodates customer compliance standards, including managing compliance-related complexities (e.g., high sensitivity to confidentiality). Champions compliance by driving knowledge sharing across geographies to build compliance capability of others.
Initiation: Drives project initiation for projects of extremely high complexity (e.g., high profile, visible worldwide impact, extremely high impact, market making) by driving commitment of delivery resources, assigning resources across workstreams, and creating complex work breakdown structures (WBSs) with delivery team. Balances needs across projects in challenging situations (e.g., scarce technical resources) and collaborates with other groups (e.g., Independent Software Vendors, Global Delivery Center) on integrated planning and organization of onshore/offshore projects.
Contracting: Oversees process for customer and partner resources (e.g., contractors, vendors) by providing input in partner briefings, partner candidate interviews, and identification and acclimation of partner resources to the team. Oversees negotiation and structuring of fixed-fee subcontractor contracts. Oversees customer contract Amendments, Delivery Acceptance, Proof of Delivery, and Invoicing.
Presales: Leads pre-sales process for extremely high-impact projects by articulating the business value proposition associated with the project/change, evaluating associated complexities and risks to ensure feasibility of commercial offer, and reviewing work of peers for quality. Participates in review of proposed scope and assists in developing Statement of Work (SOW), Work Breakdown Structures (WBSs), estimates, preliminary risk assessments, etc.
Planning: Oversees and provides input into the development of detailed project management plan to drive predictable delivery for the largest, most complex, and critical projects, leveraging deep expertise and experience and to drive scope, resources, and Microsoft project schedule in alignment and collaboration with customer plan. Drives overall strategy for project delivery and trains Microsoft and customer teams to proactively manage change as needed. Ensures use of baselining, resource load balancing, and application of work effort, dependency management, contingency planning, and utilization of software (e.g., Timeline). Establishes clear expectations and accountabilities (e.g., reconfirm scope, Responsible-Accountable-Consulted-Informed matrix) with all project team members (e.g., consultants) and stakeholders, as well as other Consulting Project Managers, for teams of high complexity by leading internal and external kick-off meetings (e.g., sales to delivery handoff, formal kick-off meetings) and may act as a lead project manager. Proactively engages broad set of internal and external stakeholders, including those who are impacted by project scope/outcome, but not directly involved (e.g., Enterprise Operating Unit, India Global Delivery, customer stakeholders) and engages subject matter experts in holistic planning activities, including team validation.
Monitoring and Controlling: Orchestrates and oversees a broad range of project metrics on the largest, most complex projects with extremely high visibility (e.g., Vice President-level, global impact) through others. Proactively ensures adherence to key performance indicators (KPIs) and provides strategic direction to drive success and adapts to high-impact changes throughout project lifecycle. Oversees and proactively manages risks and issues within and projects of extremely high complexity, leveraging previous experience and subject matter expertise to evaluate trends in risks and optimize mitigation strategies across projects for high-impact risk scenarios using qualitative analyses (e.g., probability, impact, urgency) mitigation plan for high impact/probability risks. Leads critical recoveries and engages in resolving escalations across other critical projects and ensures tools are updated. Manages issue closure as a high priority and utilizes contingency planning to proactively respond when risks become issues. Ensures timely completion and quality of deliverables (e.g., documents) and tracking of agreed upon metrics across the largest, most complex, and critical projects by applying quality management techniques for collecting data (e.g., benchmarking, interviews), monitoring output and implementing corrective action while proactively ensuring time and resources needed to mitigate quality risks. Manages success expectations to create required deliverables. Contributes across projects to provide peer guidance where needed. Discusses and confirms customer change control at kickoff, anticipates changes and proactively addresses by probing to ensure change can happen smoothly early in the process. Tests process before initiating formal change. Manages finances for high-impact projects with large, complex scopes and budgets by balancing funding and resources across workstreams, performing deep analyses, and leveraging success expectations experience and expertise. Proactively aims to reduce success expectations and improve delivery margin without impact to quality or customer experience and understands impact of decisions on the broader business (e.g., profits and losses [P&L], accrual-based accounting). Manages stakeholder communications with Chief Executive-level executives on project health, issues, and financial performance for large, complex deals throughout entire project lifecycle, tailoring communications to the audience, anticipating stakeholder requirements and adapting the plan accordingly. Establishes formal rhythms to ensure tracking and maintenance of customer deliverables and collect and report status with all important stakeholders. Produces executive summaries and presents to executive audiences.
Closure: Drives timely project closure by ensuring completion of project sign off tasks (e.g., system closeout updates, deletion of customer data, Deliverable Acceptance Form). Drives incremental process improvement by reflecting on and broadly sharing lessons learned (e.g., leading transformative projects, sharing stories with executives, developing case studies). Creates and suggests improvements to intellectual property (IP), provides feedback to managers on team member performance, and conducts closeout interviews with team members. Contributes across areas, regions, and/or world-wide levels to share knowledge, support others (e.g., Ready), and impact industry. Drives development and delivery of readiness programs (e.g., workshops, conferences).
Business Growth: Demonstrates accountability for the financial health of a project or program (e.g., revenue attainment, accurate forecasting, cost management, and utilization, skills, and capacity planning). Identifies opportunities to accelerate and drive consumption and delivery. Owns and drives backlog risk management. Drives incremental business on top of existing projects and programs through next step proposals, conducts customer discussions related to next stage proposal (NSP) and other opportunities. Engages in the pursuit cycle to ensure deals are structured appropriately. Supports and contributes to rhythm of business (ROB) and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) forecasting. Looks for or creates opportunities to maximize timely cloud consumption through current deliveries. Identifies new opportunities with customers and facilitates follow up conversations with customers on Consumption both strategically and operational, and to accelerate delivery or prevent delivery delays.
Embody our culture and values