Associate Director, Portfolio Operations and Insights

About this role

Position Summary:

The Associate Director of R&D Portfolio Operations & Insights will drive the design, standardization, and continuous improvement of portfolio management processes across the R&D organization.

This role is responsible for enabling integrated planning, improving predictability, and driving portfolio transparency through scalable PMO frameworks, data infrastructure, analytics, and reporting - including robust financial modeling, budget governance, and investment performance tracking. This individual will serve as a strategic operations partner to R&D, Finance, and PMO Leadership, ensuring there is a single-source of truth to enable portfolio insights and decisions.

Key Responsibilities:

Portfolio Governance & PMO Standardization

• Design and implement standardized PMO processes, tools, and governance frameworks across R&D.

• Establish integrated planning processes that connect strategy, resource planning, timelines, and execution milestones.

• Drive adoption of best practices for stage-gate governance, risk management, and cross-functional alignment.

• Lead continuous improvement initiatives to enhance operational rigor, predictability, and accountability.

Budget Governance & Financial Modeling

• Establish phase-appropriate budget frameworks for projects at each stage-gate, defining level of estimate rigor

• Define and maintain a standardized process for project budget creation, baseline-setting, and adjustment ensuring consistency in how budgets are structured and tracked across the portfolio

• Implement mechanisms to measure and report budget adherence at the project level, including variance analysis, earned value metrics, and escalation thresholds for material deviations

• Partners with Finance to align on capitalization and expense treatment, ensure accurate project cost coding and support close and accrual processes

• Support business case development by providing standardized templates NPV/ IRR modeling, and scenario analysis

Portfolio Management Systems & Data Infrastructure

• Own and evolve the R&D portfolio management database, ensuring data accuracy, integrity, and usability.

• Define data standards, KPIs, and portfolio health metrics including financial KPIs such as cost-to-market, forecast accuracy, and budget accuracy.

• Lead vision for automated dashboards and trending analyses to provide real-time insights to leadership.

• Enable scalable reporting capabilities through tools and systems optimization.

Portfolio Insights, Prioritization & Reporting

• Create portfolio views to support investment decisions, resource allocation, and strategic trade-offs.

• Work with PMO portfolio leads to develop executive-ready reporting packages (monthly/quarterly) highlighting progress, risks, financial performance and trends.

• Translate complex data into clear, actionable insights for senior stakeholders.

QUALIFICATIONS: