People & Culture PMO Program Manager

About This Role:

The Program Manager, People & Culture PMO will establish and lead the People & Culture Project Management Office, driving governance, execution excellence, and strategic portfolio management across HR initiatives globally. This role will maintain visibility and accountability across the People & Culture project portfolio, ensure resources are aligned to the highest-priority initiatives, proactively manage risks and issues, and measure business value through defined outcomes and return on investment. The role will also serve as a center of excellence for project management practices, coaching HR practitioners and business leads while partnering closely with the Enterprise PMO to align with established governance standards, methodologies, and reporting practices. Ability to leverage GenAI tools to support program management tasks and governance.

In addition to technology and transformation projects, the PMO will oversee operational improvement initiatives delivered in partnership with Process Excellence and other cross-functional teams.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

PMO Leadership & Governance

• Establish and mature the People & Culture PMO operating model, governance framework, and portfolio management processes.
• Develop a consistent project intake, prioritization, approval, and monitoring process for HR initiatives.
• Lead regular governance reviews of strategic projects, ensuring executive visibility into status, risks, dependencies, and key decisions.
• Facilitate monthly and quarterly portfolio reviews with People & Culture leadership.
• Ensure projects align with organizational priorities, strategic goals, and available capacity.
• Partner with Enterprise PMO leaders to adopt and maintain enterprise project management standards, templates, methodologies, and reporting requirements.

Portfolio Management

• Manage the People & Culture project portfolio, including HR Technology, Talent, Total Rewards, Employee Experience, Workforce Management, AI, Compliance, and operational excellence initiatives.
• Maintain portfolio-level visibility into investment decisions, timelines, interdependencies, and business outcomes.
• Support executive decision-making through portfolio analytics and reporting.
• Establish project prioritization frameworks to ensure resources focus on initiatives delivering the highest business value.

Resource & Capacity Management

• Develop and maintain resource planning processes across People & Culture functions.
• Track demand versus capacity across project teams and improvement initiatives.
• Identify resource constraints, conflicts, and allocation risks.
• Partner with leaders to optimize utilization, sequencing, and timing of work.
• Provide leadership with workforce and project capacity insights to support planning decisions.

Project Oversight & Delivery Excellence

• Oversee project status reporting standards across all People & Culture initiatives.
• Lead portfolio-level risk, issue, assumption, and dependency management.
• Drive consistent use of project management disciplines across projects.
• Ensure projects maintain clear scope, milestones, success metrics, and accountability.
• Partner with project teams to proactively resolve delivery challenges.

Benefits Realization & Business Value

• Establish business case development standards for strategic initiatives.
• Define and track project success measures, KPIs, benefits realization, and ROI.
• Provide executive reporting on expected and realized value from investments.
• Ensure projects have measurable outcomes aligned to business objectives.

Project Management Capability Building

• Serve as the People & Culture project management subject matter expert.
• Coach and mentor HR practitioners acting on project manager roles, HR leaders, and project sponsors on project management best practices.
• Improve organizational project management maturity through training, templates, tools, and governance.
• Develop communities of practice and project management standards across People & Culture.

Continuous Improvement & Process Excellence

• Partner with the Process Excellence team to track and govern operational improvement initiatives.
• Monitor improvement pipelines, benefit realization, and execution progress.
• Promote continuous improvement methodologies and disciplined execution practices.

Experience and Minimum Qualifications:

Required

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Project Management, Human Resources, Technology, or related field.
• 8+ years of progressive experience in Project Management, Program Management, PMO Leadership, or Portfolio Management.
• 5+ years leading enterprise or large-scale portfolios with multiple concurrent projects.
• Experience managing strategic project portfolios.
• Demonstrated experience implementing PMO governance frameworks and operating models.
• Experience tracking resource allocation, workforce capacity, and project demand planning.
• Experience developing business cases, measuring ROI, and tracking benefits realization.
• Strong executive communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Experience working in global, matrixed organizations.

Preferred Certifications

• PMP (Project Management Professional)
• PgMP (Program Management Professional)
• PfMP (Portfolio Management Professional)
• PMI-PMOCP (PMO Certified Professional)
• PRINCE2 Practitioner
• PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner)
• Lean Six Sigma Green Belt or Black Belt

Preferred Experience

• Experience supporting Human Resources, People & Culture, HR Technology, or Transformation organizations.
• Experience with Workday and HR technology deployments.
• Experience supporting enterprise governance councils and executive steering committees.
• Familiarity with Planview, Clarity, Microsoft Project, Smartsheet, or similar portfolio management tools.
• Experience partnering with Process Excellence or Continuous Improvement teams.