Design Integration Lead

Position Summary:

The Lead, Design Integrator is responsible for executing and managing a design process and works in close collaboration to with the various design disciplines such as Architectural Design, Naval Architecture, and Technical Design for the Newbuilding team at Royal Caribbean Group. This role serves a right hand and partner to the Design Project leader overseeing the project and supports all aspects of planning, tracking, status reporting, and ensuring alignment with design project goals. The position requires maintaining robust relationships with key stakeholders and ensuring seamless collaboration across departments and with external partners. 
The Lead, Design Integration is responsible for facilitating decision-making around the critical issues of time, cost, scope, and quality to drive momentum, whilst ensuring design remains within its schedule and quality guardrails.  

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:    

• Manages all aspects of Design planning, tracking, and status reporting, partnering with internal and external stakeholders to collect, analyze, and report data for recommended course of action. 

• Fosters effective collaboration and acts as a “translator” between various design disciplines, internally and externally to facilitate seamless integration. While dedicated to Design, this role involves deep collaboration with other integral disciplines 

• Promotes collaborative innovation with an eye to schedule, cost and risk awareness throughout each design phase. 

• Maintains detailed project schedules using industry-standard scheduling practices, collaborates closely with various cross-functional teams to establish design timelines and milestones, ensures timely achievement of same, and supports implementation of corrective actions as needed.  

• Ensures accuracy, validity of data on dashboards and reports and proactively maintains the same. 

• Supports project team to manage design program scope, customer and executive expectations, and overall Design program focus. 

• Continually reviews goals, adjusting ways of working to accommodate integration within Design. 

• Analyzes potential schedule risks and proactively ideates mitigation strategies. Prepares and presents schedule reports and updates to stakeholders, flagging critical risks, and potential impacts to time/cost/quality of the project. 

• Supports rigorous tracking of budgets to ensure cost-effectiveness and alignment with financial scope to ensure that costs are justified, transparent, and within approved parameters. 

• Ensures adherence to project processes and recommends enhancements. 

• Proactively engages with stakeholders to report project status, communicate project progress and key insights to facilitate informed decision-making, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and objectives. 

• Regularly reviews and communicates the design project plan status to stakeholders, partners, and team. 

• Participates in the study of operational needs and current performance to identify areas for improvement and efficiency. Act as the liaison between project team members, external partners, and other internal departments. 

• Remains current with industry trends, especially as related to project management techniques as they impact project objectives.  
• Perform Other Duties as Required: This job description in no way states or implies that these are the only duties to be performed by the employee occupying this position. Employees will be required to perform any other job-related duties assigned by their supervisor or management. 

Qualifications: 

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree with a concentration in Construction/Architecture, Business Management, Industrial Engineering, Project Management, or a related field. 

• Experience: Minimum of 5 years of experience, 2 years of managing multi-million-dollar projects and high-performing teams. 

• Software Proficiency: Proficiency in MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, and Project. Familiarity with AutoCAD and financial software systems such as AMOS, Clarity, Lotus Notes Database, JDE, and Essbase. This position may require travel to and from ships, shipyards, and/or vendor facilities located in Europe, Asia and North America (<= 25%).  

Knowledge and Skills: 

• Strong leadership skills with proven experience in leading a small to medium team of professionals. Ability to effectively manage clients and partners. 

• Deep understanding of design, construction, materials, pricing, and industry standards. 

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to communicate clearly at all levels of the organization. 

• Excellent interpersonal skills, capable of effectively communicating with diverse cultures worldwide. 

• Detail-oriented with the ability to manage multiple tasks in a fast-paced environment. 
• Ability to understand and interpret architectural plans, sections, elevations, and details.  

• Capable of interpreting an extensive variety of technical instructions in mathematical or architectural/diagram form. 

• Solid understanding of accounting rules for expense and capital activities.  

• Detail oriented with excellent analytical, financial and spreadsheet modeling skills.     

• Must be familiar with the working drawing process inclusive of drawing, dimensioning and detailing deck plans, elevations, sections and details.  

• Ability to define problems, collect data, establish facts, and draw valid conclusions.   
• Ability to interpret an extensive variety of technical instructions in mathematical or diagram form and deal with several abstract and concrete variables.