Program Director

This role is in the organization to support the delivery discipline in leading an account group or client
project portfolio.

The core expectation of this role is to partner with discipline leads to manage overall client business
needs for a given portfolio or office location. This role connects the dots between team development,
account growth, client relationships, project health/finances.

Career Development is typically provided by VP, Project Delivery [or above] but can be modified to
suit an account and/or office location. This provides career development to emerging talent.

Nature of this role of role is that of a ‘leader’.

Skills Developed

Mastery level skillset, with the ability to:
• Expertly understand the client business, goals and objectives as it applies across projects
within client portfolio and play a hybrid role with Client Services where applicable
• Effectively lead a project management team across a portfolio
• Collaboratively lead the work, anticipate client needs and preferences
• Understands interagency relationships and comfortable working in integrated OMC
models and leading interagency presentations
• Foster a cohesive and effective work environment
• Drive forward best practices and lead through change and adversity
• Communicate and present scope, timelines, and project health in an effective, easy-to-
understand manner at portfolio level
• Engage with client leads in financial and program ops, annual planning, program
management review
• Contribute to/lead creation of scope, approach, team, and budget in pitch documents
and RFPs and collaborate to identify new ways of working to drive budget efficiencies
• Proactively identify when to step into a project when required, partner with project leads
to provide a support the team needs to solution
• Identify team needed, properly secure and staff projects at a program level
• Thoroughly understand the main forms of digital and traditional marketing and how they
differ and contribute to identification of emerging/new digital marketing capabilities, lead
others in their understanding of both
• Understand the ways technology lives in projects, with a mastery level understanding of
technology types (app, tech stack, platform, VR, automation, etc.) and the ability to
effectively manage a program with a technology component and mitigate risks
• Understand the ways media lives in projects, with a mastery level understanding of
media types (paid, owned, earned audio, video, social, etc.) and the ability to manage a
program with a media component
• Collaborate to identify activities and deliverables, translate them to a high-level staff plan
and estimate, and author a statement of work outlining activities, deliverables,
assumptions, dependencies, and budget at program level – driver of change in the
account to drive efficiency
• Confidently identify investment/write off needs proactively and submit in proper
templates and forums and the ability to confidently discuss with executive level leads
• Track and report on budget burn and budget health at program level – lead proactive
communication around investment/write-offs and trends in the spend/staffing of the
account/project
• Develop and manage roadmap - partners with Client Service lead to manage pipeline

 Notable Soft Skills
• Superb verbal and written communicator
• Empathetic leader
• Expert interpersonal skills
• Pushes innovation
• Excellent presentation and storytelling skills

Hard Skills
• Mastery level knowledge of collaboration and issue tracking tools such as Box, Jira,
Confluence, Teams
• Mastery in completing tasks in office productivity tools such as Excel, Word,
Keynote, and PowerPoint at a program level
• Mastery in completing tasks with project management tools such as Tenrox,
Smartsheet, and Halo/Abacus at a program level

Activities Performed
• Build and own operational cadences for a program of work, including finance tracker,
resourcing planning, recruitment, executional tools and templates, and reporting
• Lead the team to ensure the work stays on brief, client needs and feedback are
understood/addressed, and the work delivered is of high quality
• Proactively identify and communicate risk/implications and mitigation strategies
• Lead the creation of templates and processes for department
• Ensure executive leadership has necessary visibility into the work
• Use knowledge of client goals/ competition to identify opportunities for growth
• Manage scoping and intake large scale projects and programs in partnership with Client
Services and discipline leads
• Plan for portfolio and account growth across all facets - budgets, staffing, scope, planning and
execution
• Perform portfolio analysis and reporting on project health, attending finance meetings to
inform account health (Metrics include: Remaining forecast, forecast to completion, burn
(actuals) to date, % project progress, % budget utilized, write off %), identify strategies to
work more efficiently
• Provides oversight to project management team across a portfolio – seamlessly manage a
portfolio of $1MM or more
• Approve client invoices and third-party purchase orders
• Champion project management fundamentals across all assigned projects, across timeline,
action logs, change logs, risk logs, appropriate kick-off and closure processes
• Facilitate or assign (when appropriate) in project retrospective and sunsetting process to take
learnings forward within account group
• Be a leader within the discipline who can inform delivery with mastery
• Use knowledge and larger scale perspective to influence delivery quality and advocate for
clients' success
• Act as key contact for operations resources for an office/location/ account group and key
partner to team and discipline leads across portfolio
• Motivate team in a productive and proactive way, promote "yes, and?" thinking to uncover
potential and/or solutions
• Actively and visibly champion the work and team
• Participate in interagency presentations
• Support team dynamics and performance with guidance and conversation
• Provide career development aligned with CM expectations

The Talent Team at Critical Mass is focused on ensuring we provide the best training, onboarding, and employee experience possible!  Our new hires & employees are the future of our organization, and we want to set you up for long-term success.  In an effort to do so, we expect our team to work from an office 4 days a week.  The ask stems from our want to:

Strengthen opportunity for continuous learning

Improve collaboration and team relationships.

Increase employee engagement

This hybrid model balances the need for individual flexibility while maintaining the relentless customer focus we provide at CM.  We understand that not everyone may feel comfortable with this expectation, so we ask that you please let us know immediately if there are any concerns so we can help navigate accordingly