Project Director (Data & AI Solutions)

Insignia is looking for a Project Director to elevate our end-to-end delivery into a repeatable, high-trust consulting experience. This role will lead a portfolio of enterprise programs (Data Platform, Analytics Modernization, GenAI, MLOps, Cloud Migration), while building and standardizing a PMO framework that drives:

• Higher renewal rate / new projects from existing customers
• Reduced escalations
• Faster time-to-value
• Stronger NPS
• Tighter scope, quality, and risk control

This role is both a line manager for PMs and a governance leader who sets the delivery bar, ensures operational discipline, and strengthens client confidence.

Key Responsibilities

1) Portfolio Delivery Leadership (Outcome + Quality + Predictability)

• Own delivery health across multiple projects: on-time, on-scope, on-budget, and quality.
• Establish delivery rhythm: weekly governance, RAID, scope checkpoints, acceptance criteria, and clear escalation pathways.
• Ensure “business value realized” by aligning deliverables to measurable outcomes and adoption milestones.

2) PMO Build & Standardization (Your #1 Mandate)

• Build and roll out Insignia’s PMO playbook: templates, SOPs, reporting standards, and delivery methodology.
• Define the minimum standard for “Insignia way of delivery” so PMs become a preferred consultant to customers (trusted, structured, proactive).
• Implement continuous improvement loops: post-mortems, lessons learned, and portfolio-level risk prevention.

3) Stakeholder Management & Escalation Control

• Drive stakeholder alignment early and continuously — especially on scope clarity, roles & responsibilities, data readiness, and change management.
• Lead executive-level steering with customer leadership, prevent escalations through proactive expectation management and decision logs.
• Resolve project risks rooted in coordination, governance, and cross-team dependencies

4) Commercial & Decision Rights Ownership

• Own critical decisions: scope change approvals, staffing changes, commercial trade-offs, and escalation authority.
• Partner with Sales/Pre-Sales to structure delivery approaches that minimize execution risk and improve client confidence.
• Convert successful delivery into growth: identify upsell opportunities and position follow-on initiatives based on results.

5) People Leadership (PM Capability Uplift)

• Lead and coach PM team 
• Upskill PM discipline, consulting behavior, stakeholder handling, and persuasion skills.
• Create performance standards and coaching cadence to build a high-performing delivery bench.

Qualifications (Must-Have)

• 6+ years experience in program/project delivery leadership in consulting/vendor/SI environments.
• Proven track record delivering enterprise initiatives across Data Platform / Analytics / AI / MLOps / GenAI
• Strong PMO and governance capability — has built or standardized SOPs, templates, delivery methodology, and reporting frameworks.
• Executive stakeholder management strength: can drive alignment, decisions, and expectation management with senior client stakeholders.
• Commercial maturity: confident managing scope trade-offs, change requests, staffing decisions, and delivery risk to protect outcomes.
• Strong coaching capability to uplift junior PMs into structured, persuasive consultants.

Preferred (Nice-to-Have)

• Experience improving retention/renewals through delivery excellence.
• Familiar with change management frameworks and adoption planning (training, UAT governance, rollout strategy).
• Certifications (optional): PMP/PRINCE2/SAFe/Agile, cloud certifications.

Preferred Personalities:

1. Influence without authority, both directions — needs to align internal teams (sales, delivery, leadership) and client-side executives, often without formal command. This is the throughline for the steering, escalation-prevention, and decision-rights parts of the Job Descriptions.
2. Structured strategic thinker — not just a template-follower, but someone who can architect a delivery approach and reason through trade-offs (scope vs. risk vs. commercial impact). This is what separates someone who can build the actual PMO playbook from someone who just runs status meetings.
3. Humble / coachable — especially important for someone walking into client environments and earning trust rather than asserting authority, and it models the right behavior for the PMs they're meant to be upskilling.
4. Proactive / ownership mindset — surfaces risk before it becomes an escalation rather than waiting to be told; ties directly to the "prevent escalations through proactive expectation management" line.
5. Fast learner, domain-agnostic — given the portfolio spans Data Platform, Analytics, GenAI, MLOps, and Cloud Migration, they don't need to be a deep expert in each, but need to ramp quickly enough to ask the right questions and spot risk in any of them.
6. Adaptive across context — flexes communication style and delivery rigor based on client maturity, culture, and the specific module in play.
7. A couple I'd add that aren't in your list but are strongly implied by the responsibilities:
8. Composed under pressure — this person owns escalation authority and commercial trade-off decisions.
9. Executive presence — they're expected to run C-level steering conversations and convert delivery success into upsell conversations with Sales/Pre-Sales, which requires a certain gravitas that's distinct from just being a good PM.
10. Scope mastery — doesn't just defend scope to avoid risk, but deeply understands the contract boundaries well enough to spot where the client's ask naturally extends beyond it. 
11. Commercial instinct on change requests — sees every CR not as a delivery headache to minimize, but as a monetization opportunity to convert into incremental revenue.