IT Associate Director, PMO and Quality Assurance

Church & Dwight•Ewing, NJ

7d•Hybrid

About The Position

Church and Dwight is seeking an IT Associate Director, PMO and Quality Assurance to join their team. This role is responsible for leading the enterprise delivery engine for Church & Dwight technology, including portfolio governance, delivery methods, and quality assurance. The role is accountable for translating the company's strategic agenda into a sequenced, funded, and resourced portfolio, making delivery performance visible and credible to executive leadership, and raising the throughput of the delivery organization. A key responsibility is providing program management office services to CEO-sponsored and Executive Leadership Team initiatives, managing Corporate Strategic Deliverables (CSDs), and producing executive-grade reporting. The role also leads the agile and automation transformation of technology delivery and modernizes IT Quality Assurance through risk-based and continuous validation, automated testing, and embedded controls. The individual partners closely with IT leadership, business stakeholders, and strategic internal and external partners to build capability, manage risk, and foster a culture of accountability, continuous improvement, automation adoption, and business partnership.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business, Engineering, Life Sciences, or related field
10+ years of progressive IT project, program, portfolio, quality assurance, compliance governance or solution delivery experience spanning multiple functional areas, including accountability for enterprise-level delivery performance
5+ years of leadership experience managing teams, consultants, vendors, or cross-functional resources
Demonstrated success working with PMO and IT QA governance, including IT systems delivery standards, portfolio reporting, resource and budget oversight, vendor management, validation oversight, quality risk, data integrity, and compliance in a regulated environment
Demonstrated experience leading an agile or product operating model transformation at enterprise scale, including the governance, funding and vendor contracting changes required to make it hold, rather than solely operating within an existing agile framework
Experience providing program management support directly to C-suite or executive-committee-sponsored initiatives, including executive-level status reporting, escalation and decision facilitation
Working familiarity with modern delivery, automation, and quality tooling, including enterprise portfolio management platforms, workflow automation, CI/CD, automated testing frameworks, automated regression management, continuous compliance evidence, analytics dashboards, and the emerging use of AI-assisted tooling in delivery, testing, and reporting
Enterprise leadership across IT PMO, portfolio governance, product and agile delivery, delivery assurance, IT QA governance, validation oversight and compliance management
Strong business acumen with ability to align project portfolios, governance practices, and quality priorities to IT strategy and measurable business outcomes
Demonstrated ability to lead, coach, and develop high-performing teams, consultants, and vendor partners in a matrixed environment
Deep understanding of IT PMO operating models, lean portfolio management, capacity-based prioritization, flow and outcome metrics, executive reporting, financial oversight, risk management and decision governance
Strong knowledge of quality systems, validation governance, data integrity, regulatory expectations, inspection readiness, and risk-based assurance for IT systems
Proven vendor management capability, including partner performance oversight, contract alignment, cost discipline, service quality, and accountability for commitments
Ability to establish scalable standards, SOPs, controls, metrics, and reporting practices that improve transparency, governance maturity, compliance posture, and delivery confidence
Ability to identify, prioritize, and scale automation opportunities across PMO and QA operations, including automated workflows, test automation, reporting automation, metrics generation, evidence capture, and AI-assisted delivery practices.
Excellent executive communication, stakeholder management, facilitation, influence, conflict resolution, and decision-support skills are a must.
Ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced, matrixed, regulated, and evolving environment while balancing speed, quality, risk, and business value
Executive program leadership: able to run a governance forum for the CEO and ELT, present an unwelcome status without softening it, and convert an executive decision into a sequenced plan within days
Change leadership in delivery transformation: able to move an organization from milestone-based project execution to product-oriented incremental delivery, and to hold the line while the transition is uncomfortable

Nice To Haves

Advanced degree preferred
Consumer packaged goods industry experience and experience working in GxP, FDA, SOX, or other regulated environments preferred
Project, Program, Agile, Quality, or Validation certification preferred

Responsibilities

Own the enterprise delivery operating model, including methods, governance standards, tooling and portfolio data, and evolve it deliberately by retiring practices that add ceremony without reducing risk.
Establish a portfolio performance system built on outcome and flow measures, including delivery cycle time, throughput, predictability, escaped defects and benefit realization against business case, rather than activity and milestone completion alone.
Provide portfolio-level oversight of plans, funding, capacity, dependencies, risks and executive decisions, with clear accountability, timely escalation, and a single authoritative view of portfolio health that IT and business leadership both trust.
Provide dedicated program management office services to CEO-sponsored and ELT-sponsored enterprise initiatives, acting as the program management arm for work that crosses functions and cannot be governed inside a single department.
Manage and report on Corporate Strategic Deliverables (CSDs) end to end: agree the deliverable definition and success measures with the sponsoring executive, maintain the master plan and dependency map, run the cadence, and produce the CEO and ELT reporting pack.
Maintain one authoritative status for every CSD, on track or at risk or off track with a named recovery owner and a recovery date, and escalate divergence early rather than reporting green until the deadline.
Advise the ELT on sequencing when Corporate CSDs and departmental CSDs compete for the same people, funding or system freeze windows, presenting the capacity constraint as a decision to be taken rather than a delivery failure to be explained.
Set the direction for quality engineering and compliance assurance, moving from document-heavy, end-of-cycle validation toward risk-based, continuous validation with controls embedded in the delivery pipeline.
Ensure QA standards, controls, documentation expectations, and governance practices support adherence to applicable GxP, validation, data integrity, SOX, privacy, and compliance requirements.
Build automated testing frameworks, AI-assisted test generation and review practices, environment and release automation, automated regression suites, service virtualization where appropriate, and continuous compliance evidence into the delivery pipeline, so release readiness is demonstrated by the pipeline rather than assembled by hand before each go-live.
Represent IT Quality in audits, inspections, quality reviews, governance forums, and cross-functional compliance initiatives, ensuring clear ownership and timely remediation of findings or risks.
Reduce the elapsed time and cost of validation on each successive release while holding or improving the compliance posture, and report both measures to IT leadership as standing metrics.
Lead the agile transformation of technology delivery: establish product-oriented teams with persistent ownership, backlog and prioritization discipline, and incremental delivery in place of long single-release project cycles.
Set and track flow metrics including cycle time, throughput, work in progress, deployment frequency and change failure rate, and use them to remove the constraints that slow delivery rather than to rank individual teams.
Rationalize governance so oversight is proportional to risk: lightweight continuous assurance for low-risk change, with full validation rigor reserved for GxP, SOX and data-integrity-critical systems.
Coach sponsors, business partners and vendors in agile ways of working, including how to fund, govern and accept incrementally delivered work, recognizing that the binding constraint on delivery speed is usually decision latency rather than engineering capacity.
Partner with IT leadership on the adoption of AI-assisted engineering, testing and delivery tooling, and establish the quality and compliance guardrails that allow it to be used safely at scale.
Lead, coach, and develop PMO and QA team members, including full-time employees, contractors, consultants, and vendor resources, with a focus on leadership growth, accountability, and succession depth.
Build organizational capability across portfolio governance, product and program leadership, agile delivery, quality engineering, validation governance, vendor management and delivery excellence, including a deliberate reskilling path for project managers moving into product-oriented roles.
Foster a collaborative culture focused on accountability, continuous improvement, learning, and business partnership.
Build strong relationships with IT leaders, business stakeholders, project sponsors, site quality teams, vendors, and external partners.
Manage vendor and consulting partner relationships to ensure delivery quality, contract alignment, cost discipline and compliance with CHD standards, and shift agreements toward outcome- and capacity-based models that support incremental delivery rather than fixed-scope, fixed-milestone contracting.
Influence across levels and functions to drive alignment, resolve conflicts, and support timely decision-making.
Identify and lead opportunities to automate PMO processes, QA practices, SOPs, templates, intake workflows, status reporting, dashboarding, controls evidence, test execution, regression tracking, and governance routines to reduce manual effort and improve transparency, consistency, and cycle time.
Drive lessons learned, post-project reviews, governance maturity improvements, and quality trend analysis to improve future project delivery, compliance posture, and partner performance.
Promote pragmatic, scalable ways of working that balance speed, quality, risk, and business value.
Establish automation roadmaps and adoption metrics for PMO and QA capabilities, prioritizing high-value use cases such as automated portfolio reporting, workflow orchestration, test automation coverage, defect analytics, release readiness evidence, and AI-assisted delivery support.