PowerPlan is seeking a Director of the Project Management Office to strengthen and, where necessary, redesign the Professional Services delivery operating model.
This is a hands-on, roll-up-your-sleeves leadership role. PowerPlan is seeking an executive operator and coach on the field—a leader who drives change from within the work alongside the team, not from above it.
This leader will oversee a portfolio of up to 150 concurrent enterprise software implementation, upgrade, migration, and optimization engagements serving energy and utility customers. The Director will be accountable for improving portfolio control, customer outcomes, financial performance, delivery predictability, and the capabilities of PowerPlan’s Project and Program Management organization.
The successful candidate will inherit an established PMO with existing people, processes, and technology, but with opportunities to improve consistency in execution, governance adherence, portfolio visibility, data quality, forecasting, and accountability.
This is not a methodology administration role.
The Director will be expected to rapidly diagnose root causes, distinguish process gaps from capability and accountability gaps, stabilize critical engagements, harden the delivery operating model, and drive sustained behavioral adoption across Project Managers, Program Managers, delivery leaders, and cross-functional partners.
This is a hands-on PMO transformation and portfolio leadership mandate. The Director must be equally capable of designing scalable systems, confronting weak execution, developing leaders, managing customer escalations, and translating portfolio performance into clear business decisions.
This is an executive operator role, not an ivory-tower directorship. PowerPlan is looking for a coach on the field—a leader who rolls up their sleeves, works shoulder to shoulder with Project and Program Managers, and steps directly into the work when it matters. The Director sets strategy and builds durable systems, but leads from the field: in the reviews, in the recoveries, and alongside the team, never from a distance.
The Director will serve as the business owner for PMO methodology, delivery governance, portfolio assurance, and Certinia PSA, formerly FinancialForce. The role will also provide selective executive sponsorship to PowerPlan’s most strategic or highest-risk customer programs.
PowerPlan develops enterprise-grade tax, accounting, reporting, and workflow automation solutions tailored specifically for energy industry organizations.
Our customers operate in environments where financial accuracy, regulatory compliance, operational reliability, and scalability are critical. PowerPlan’s Professional Services organization partners with customers through implementations, upgrades, SaaS migrations, packaged solutions, and optimization engagements that deliver measurable financial and operational outcomes for the office of the CFO.
The Director, PMO is accountable for creating a Professional Services delivery system in which:
The Director will have the authority to independently assess project health, challenge unsupported forecasts, require corrective-action plans, escalate unresolved delivery risks, and recommend changes in project leadership, staffing, governance, or commercial approach when customer, financial, or delivery outcomes are at risk.
Establish an evidence-based baseline of portfolio health and stabilize the highest-risk customer engagements.
Identify the root causes of inconsistent delivery performance across project governance, planning, staffing, solution execution, commercial structure, product dependencies, customer readiness, leadership accountability, and cross-functional decision-making.
Within the first 90 days, provide Professional Services leadership with:
Professional Services cannot improve what it cannot accurately see.
Establishing control of the portfolio is the first requirement for improving revenue predictability, customer confidence, delivery quality, and organizational credibility.
The Director must first establish truth, stop deterioration, and stabilize critical engagements before attempting broader transformation.
Operationalize, adjust, and enforce a scalable Professional Services delivery operating model across the PMO.
Create a tiered methodology with required controls and differentiated governance based on engagement size, complexity, commercial structure, strategic importance, customer readiness, and delivery risk.
The methodology must support PowerPlan’s range of engagement types, including:
A mature PMO is not a collection of individually managed projects or a library of templates.
It is a system of clear expectations, decision rights, operating rhythms, accountability mechanisms, and intervention thresholds that produces consistent outcomes without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.
Methodology compliance is expected, but governance must remain proportional to project risk and complexity. The goal is execution discipline, not compliance theater.
Establish consistent financial and commercial management across the Professional Services portfolio.
Ensure that each project has credible visibility into budget, effort, revenue, margin, scope position, estimate to complete, estimate at completion, change exposure, and financial risk.
Improve Professional Services revenue predictability and protect project economics through disciplined project-level financial management.
A project can appear operationally healthy while creating material financial loss.
Professional Services leadership must understand not only whether work is progressing, but whether engagements are converting backlog, protecting margin, controlling scope, and producing the expected financial outcome.
Partner with Professional Services Operations, Finance, Sales, and delivery leaders to establish standards for:
Require financial recovery plans when project economics move outside agreed tolerances.
Ensure that Program Managers and Project Managers understand and actively manage the commercial consequences of delivery decisions.
Create an independent project assurance capability that validates whether reported project health is supported by evidence.
Implement structured assurance for strategic, complex, newly launched, materially changed, and at-risk engagements.
Project teams frequently develop optimism bias, normalize deteriorating conditions, or delay escalation because of customer pressure, internal expectations, or incomplete information.
Independent assurance helps leadership identify risk while intervention options still exist.
The Director must be willing to challenge a green status when the evidence indicates yellow or red.
Establish Certinia PSA, formerly FinancialForce, as the trusted system of record for Professional Services PMO portfolio data.
Ensure that project, financial, milestone, resource, utilization, forecast, risk, and health data is complete, current, consistently defined, and reliable enough to support executive decision-making.
Leadership cannot make effective decisions when project data is inconsistent, outdated, incomplete, or shaped to tell a preferred story.
Reliable data is foundational to portfolio management, financial forecasting, resource planning, customer intervention, and business accountability.
Establish disciplined demand and capacity planning across the PMO.
Ensure that project commitments, projected starts, and portfolio plans are evaluated against available skills, role capacity, delivery constraints, project sequencing, and hiring lead times.
Utilization alone does not indicate whether the organization can responsibly deliver committed work.
Poor capacity planning leads to delayed starts, excessive multitasking, SME bottlenecks, unstable staffing, customer dissatisfaction, and margin deterioration.
Build a high-performing Project and Program Management organization with the capability, judgment, commercial awareness, and leadership discipline required to deliver complex enterprise software engagements.
Create a culture of ownership, transparency, continuous improvement, and direct accountability.
The quality ceiling of the PMO is determined by the quality of its leaders.
Strong Project and Program Managers anticipate issues, confront difficult realities, manage customers effectively, protect project economics, and require less executive intervention.
Strengthen the operating interfaces among Sales, other Professional Services practices, Product, Engineering, Support, Finance, and other business functions.
Ensure that projects enter delivery with executable scope, realistic assumptions, appropriate staffing, clear ownership, and known dependencies.
Many delivery failures originate before the project begins or outside the formal control of the Project Manager.
The PMO must identify and address systemic causes of failure rather than repeatedly compensating for weak handoffs, poor estimates, ambiguous scope, product gaps, resource constraints, or slow organizational decisions.
Provide executive sponsorship to a limited number of PowerPlan’s most strategically important, complex, or highest-risk customer programs.
Build senior customer relationships, improve executive alignment, and intervene when obstacles require leadership beyond the project team.
Establish a scalable executive-sponsorship model for the wider strategic-account portfolio rather than making the PMO Director the primary escalation point for every major customer.
Large enterprise customers expect visible senior engagement.
Effective executive sponsorship builds customer trust, enables difficult conversations, accelerates decisions, and improves the probability of successful outcomes, references, renewals, and expansion.
Ensure that the PMO’s work remains directly connected to Professional Services’ strategic and financial objectives.
Translate Professional Services and company strategy into operating priorities, governance decisions, workforce requirements, technology investments, and measurable portfolio outcomes.
Represent PMO performance, risks, improvement priorities, and investment needs to senior leadership with clarity, candor, and confidence.
A PMO that optimizes internal process metrics without improving customer, financial, or strategic outcomes creates activity without value.
The PMO must operate as a business leadership function, not a reporting organization.
Establish a concise set of portfolio-level KPIs and executive dashboards that make delivery, financial, portfolio, and customer health visible at a glance.
Produce trustworthy, decision-ready insight that is shared upward with the Vice President of Professional Services and used, in partnership, to drive change within the PMO for the benefit of our customers.
Leadership acts on what it can see. Without a shared, reliable view of portfolio performance, decisions are delayed, risks surface late, and improvement cannot be measured.
A well-designed KPI and reporting layer turns raw project data into a management instrument that focuses attention, exposes trends early, and creates a common basis for accountability and investment decisions.
Establish a systematic mechanism for capturing client feedback across the engagement lifecycle and converting it into concrete changes in how the PMO delivers.
Ensure that client sentiment, expectations, and outcomes are visible to Professional Services leadership and actively used to prioritize improvement.
Delivery quality is ultimately judged by the client, not by internal process metrics. A PMO that cannot hear its customers cannot improve for them.
A disciplined feedback loop turns individual client experiences into portfolio-wide learning, strengthening retention, references, and expansion.
Ensure that new delivery standards, governance, and behaviors are genuinely adopted in daily practice, not merely published.
Build the stakeholder alignment, communication, and reinforcement needed for PMO change to endure.
Most transformation efforts fail not in design but in adoption. Standards that are not lived produce no improvement.
Durable change requires visible leadership, clear expectations, and consistent reinforcement across Project Managers, Program Managers, and cross-functional partners.
The Director will establish baselines and improvement targets across a balanced PMO scorecard.
Measures may include:
The Director will assess and recommend the PMO structure, roles, spans of control, and enabling capabilities required to execute the mandate.
This may include capabilities such as:
The Director is expected to work through leaders and systems rather than becoming the permanent owner of every escalation or distressed project.
The successful candidate will:
PowerPlan is not seeking someone to administer the existing PMO.
We are seeking a delivery executive who can establish control, rebuild and harden the operating model, elevate the capability of the team, strengthen commercial and operational discipline, and make predictable execution the norm.
Above all, we are seeking an executive operator and coach on the field—a leader who gets into the work with the team to get things done, not one who directs from afar.
PowerPlan is an EOE
Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice
Please note that this is a hybrid role that involves a combination of onsite work from our corporate office as well as work from home. While we strive to accommodate flexible working arrangements when sensible, there will be times when onsite work is required. This could include scheduled office days, team meetings, client meetings, or special events.