Associate Director Delivery Management

Mindshare is a media services company that acceleratesGood Growthfor its employees and clients in the age of transformation.Good Growth is business growth that is enduring and sustainable whilst also helping to shape society and the world for the better. Good Growth only happens with our people.

At Mindshare, weenable and empower our people to thrive, creating an environment where they can do the best work of their careers by envisioning what Good Growth means to them and their clients.

We were the first purpose built company created by WPP and today our 10,000 people operate in 116 offices in 86 countries, helping to drive Good Growth for our clients, our people, the industry and the world.

Summary

This role will work closely with teams driving transformation projects for our clients to ensure the teams are delivering promised and expected results to unlock value for our clients. This critical role will act as a facilitator and collaborator across workstreams, specialists, local teams and client stakeholders to translate scope into plans needed to deliver required outputs. This role requires management of multiple internal stakeholders, timelines, and resources, ideally in an agile way. The ambition is to consistently optimise processes, delivering better quality and more efficient outputs.

This role will also work across Mindshare practices as part of the sales and solutioning process to understand client needs and ensure the team is shaped appropriately to deliver the desired outcomes.

Mindshare operates in a matrixed organisation - you'll be part of the Delivery Management practice which will provide community of craft, frameworks / toolkits, performance expectations and career management while day-to-day work and priorities will be directed by the client leadership team..

Key Attributes:

As an Associate Director in the Delivery Management practice, you will work as an integral member of client teams driving marketing and media transformation. You will play a key role in the management of, communication about and coordination across multiple concurrent workstreams. You will design, implement and run simple and efficient program governance processes.

You build strong relationships across the agency and client team to ensure visibility, clarity, collaboration and strategic alignment.

You will be a strategic problem solver as well as an effective business operator. You will partner with Finance teams to look holistically at account financials, utilization data and capacity management. You will work with teams to ensure strategic alignment with client and agency priorities.

You will work across exciting workstreams and teams, solving unexpected issues, and facilitating collaboration to stay on track. A can-do, roll-up your sleeves attitude to problem solving is essential and making sure you work with people from the client, GroupM, WPP and within the local markets to find solutions in a timely manner is key.

You will work with other practices as they identify opportunities for organic growth and collaborate across practices to build proactive solutions for client challenges. Ensuring we have clearly articulated scope and outcomes to frame each potential project.

You should be passionate about helping Mindshare to build a best-in-class Delivery Management culture focused on emotional maturity, organisational agility and continual improvement. When needed you'll coach workstream and initiative leads.

You're equal parts project manager, strategic thinker, process designer, change agent and consultative problem solver with a proven track record of driving results across a range of internal and external stakeholder.

You are are comfortable driving results across a range of internal and external stakeholders.

Objectives:

Delivery Leadership

• Owns day-to-day project management driving collaboration and progress across workstreams
• Owns overall team scope, ensures the team understands their parts, and creates the plans to deliver expected outcomes
• Keeps clients updated on team status, drives mitigation of risks and actively tracks / communicates dependencies
• Internal connector and facilitator to ensure complex solutions are orchestrated across workstreams
• Identifies out of scope client challenges that Mindshare has skills and expertise to solve
• Internal connector and driver to help frame proactive solutions to out of scope client problems
• Defines governance model to drive connection, collaboration, and communication within the team and with the client stakeholders
• Develops an in-depth understanding of the Client business
• Manages ad hoc requests and enlists people needed to action them

Delivery Operations

• Works with finance team and media lead on delivery of MSA requirements
• Ensuring proper casting across all positions
• Partnering with finance teams on account financials, invoicing and POs
• May help driving creation and curation of QBR contents
• Supporting global media lead on top-to-top communications and relationship management

The Ideal Candidate

• 6-8 years of experience in Business Analysis, Project Management or Management Consulting - working knowledge of Media Agency and Holding Company capabilities, solutions and operating models a plus
• Able to translate strategic vision and priorities into operational reality
• Builds efficient and highly effective teams with well-defined ways of working and collaboration
• Fosters communication and knowledge sharing within and outside of the team
• Drives results and expected outcomes

Essential criteria

• Equal parts project manager, process designer, change manager and strategic thinker
• Able to translate strategic vision and priorities into operational reality
• Drives results and expected outcomes
• Quintessential planner who can plot the course from start to finish, identify and mitigate risks, and can seamlessly shift between the strategic and tactical
• Adept collaborator comfortable fostering relationships and working across all levels both internal and client
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills
• Comfortable with ambiguity and breaking down complex problems into simple solutions
• Challenger of status quo and change agent
• Proficient at designing and implementing efficient, effective ways of working that leveraging technology and automation where possible to work smarter not harder
• Excellent written / verbal communication and storytelling skills including ability to tailor message based on audience

Other core skills:

• Knowledge of project management, collaboration and knowledge sharing tools such as Teams/SharePoint, Planner, Miro, Wrike
• Lifelong learner who is comfortable leaning into unknown subject areas and quickly gaining working knowledge and understanding
• Understands how to operate in a matrixed organization taking day-to-day direction from client based teams and adhering to practice / craft specific standards