Operational Excellence Programme Manager

About Us

IPG Mediabrands is the media and marketing solutions division of Interpublic Group (NYSE: IPG). Mediabrands manages approximately $40 billion in marketing investment globally on behalf of its clients and provides strategic services and solutions across its award-winning, full-service agency networks UM, Initiative and Mediahub and through its innovative marketing specialist companies Kinesso, Magna, Orion, Rapport and Mediabrands Content Studio. Mediabrands clients include many of the world’s most recognizable and iconic brands from a broad portfolio of industry sectors. The company employs more than 13,000 marketing experts in more than 130 countries representing the full diversity of humanity. For more information, please visit our website: www.ipgmediabrands.com.

Role Description

We are seeking an experienced Media Operations Programme Manager with a strong operations / finance background to oversee one of our key Media Operations Programmes – The Book-Bill-Pay Programme. This Programme is critical in ensuring seamless integration between our client teams, media operations and financial management, optimising the efficiency, consistency and accuracy of our media buying and financial processes, ultimately driving value for our clients and enabling our people to focus on high-value work. 

You will be working with the UK Transformation Team, and broader teams, to: 

• Shape, deliver and manage our B-B-P Programme vision and roadmap, in conjunction with our global colleagues and local agency, operations and finance users, through to delivery success

• Support the broader UK transformation agenda and ensure Book-Bill-Pay ties into the portfolio of change IPG Mediabrands are driving. This will include contributing / influencing key strategic programme / project design, planning and roll out decisions. 

This role requires an excellent grasp of Programme management techniques, tools and approaches, and will be required to set the tone, spur enthusiasm, engage stakeholders and ensure the changes required are executed, with demonstrable success.

This role will work closely with Agency users, Media Operations, IT, Finance and our Transformation team to ensure timely progress is made, the programme is understood and governed, key messages are cascaded to impacted stakeholders and the change is ultimately rolled out in a way that maximises impact. 

Furthermore, the role will develop a clear programme strategy and direction to ensure that resources are deployed to the different priorities to deliver both short term improvement and long term value

Key Responsibilities

• Ultimately accountable and responsible for the success of the projects and delivering the end-to-end programme, ensuring that it meets its objectives and delivers the projected outcomes 

• Owns the vision for the programme and provides clear leadership and direction throughout its life, and leverages sound governance principles to facilitate smooth decision making aligned to overall Transformation and B-B-P strategic goals

• Proactively owns and manages key programme artefacts including:

• Initiation/Scope Documentation

• Business case

• Integrated Plans and Resource trackers

• KPIs

• Business Impact Assessment

• Change Request Log

• Owner of the overall business change that is being enabled, and acts as the custodian of the supporting Business Case and KPIs

• Helps sell the vision of the programme, builds motivation behind the projects and ensures engagement by the impacted teams through the project 

• Builds and motivates the project teams, in a controlled manner – creating a space to learn and grow whilst driving focus on outcomes 

• Works with the change team to develop, own and maintain the change management plan to:

• Ensure that the impact of changes to the business as a result of the programme are understood and works with agency leadership to ensure that the change impact is acceptable 

• Prepare the affected business areas / people for the transition to new ways of working and manage them through the transition process  

• Identify, engage and educate key senior stakeholders and agency leads 

• Ensures consistent programme roll out of strategies across regions & agencies, as well as creating a point of contact to share learnings.

Desired Skills & Experience

• Proven track record in Programme Management 
• Experience in a Media Agency or an equivalent complex, multifaceted and fast-paced organisation
  
  
• Flexible and adaptable; able to manage ambiguity and uncertainty

• Recent experience of taking an organisation through complex transformation aimed at operational excellence

• Demonstrates ability to positively and collaboratively work towards resolution of challenges, constraints, and roadblocks and leading innovation across operations

• Excellent communication skills and collaborative working style; able to adapt communication and engagement styles according to the audience  

• Ability to influence others and move toward a common vision or goal 

• Ability to manage and develop a high performing, cross-agency, cross-functional project teams of business operation and transformation experts

• Organised with a natural inclination for “getting things done”

Key stakeholders

• Agency Teams

• Media Operations

• Finance, HR and IT

• Global Capability Centre (GCC)

• IPG Mediabrands Global

• UK Transformation Programme/Project Team