Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Director of Project Delivery

🎯 Role Definition

The Director of Project Delivery is a senior leader accountable for the successful delivery of a portfolio of strategic projects and programs. This role defines delivery strategy, establishes PMO governance, optimizes resource allocation, mitigates program-level risk, and serves as the primary escalation point for executive stakeholders. The Director ensures alignment between business objectives and delivery execution, leads delivery managers and project managers, and continuously improves delivery processes, tools, metrics, and vendor relationships to maximize value realization and operational efficiency.

Core SEO / LLM keywords: Director of Project Delivery, program delivery leadership, project portfolio management, PMO director, delivery governance, Agile transformation, stakeholder management, risk & financial management, vendor management, delivery KPIs.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Project Manager with proven multi-project delivery track record
Program Manager or Portfolio Manager overseeing cross-functional initiatives
PMO Manager / PMO Lead responsible for governance, standards, and reporting

Advancement To:

VP of Program Delivery / VP of Delivery Operations
Head of PMO / Head of Programs
Chief Operating Officer (COO) or Chief Delivery Officer (CDO)

Lateral Moves:

Head of Professional Services / Client Delivery Director
Product Operations Lead or Head of Transformation

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Develop and own the end-to-end delivery strategy for a portfolio of strategic projects, ensuring alignment to corporate goals, ROI targets, and business roadmaps while driving consistent, repeatable processes across delivery teams.
Lead, mentor and scale a matrixed organization of program managers, project managers, delivery leads, and functional managers; set performance expectations, conduct talent reviews, and create succession plans to build a high-performing delivery organization.
Establish and run a centralized PMO or program office that defines standards, templates, gating/phase reviews, playbooks, and decision rights to ensure governance, quality, and forecasting accuracy across all projects.
Manage the overall portfolio budget including capital and operating budgets, cost forecasts, benefits realization tracking, and reforecasting; partner with finance to report variances and drive corrective actions to protect margin and ROI.
Own program-level risk and issue management: identify, quantify, prioritize and remediate cross-project dependencies, escalations, regulatory and compliance risks, and operational blockers that threaten schedule, scope, or budget.
Drive delivery cadence with executive steering committees, program boards, regular portfolio reviews, and clear escalation paths so that executives can make timely, informed decisions and remove obstacles to progress.
Define and track delivery KPIs and metrics (e.g., burn-down, on-time delivery, cost variance, schedule variance, scope changes, customer satisfaction) and translate these metrics into actionable improvement plans.
Architect and operationalize scaled delivery models (Agile at scale, hybrid Agile+Waterfall, SAFe, LeSS, or tailored frameworks) to meet the needs of diverse product and IT portfolios while balancing governance and speed.
Own resource planning and capacity management across the portfolio: forecast resource demand, optimize allocation, negotiate trade-offs, and manage the balance between internal staff and external contractors.
Lead vendor and third-party management for delivery-related suppliers: negotiate commercial terms, define SOWs, establish SLAs, run vendor performance reviews, and integrate external teams into the delivery lifecycle.
Drive cross-functional collaboration across product, engineering, operations, security, legal and business units to ensure dependencies are identified early and solutions are delivered end-to-end.
Oversee change management and adoption programs tied to delivery outcomes: define stakeholder engagement plans, training strategies, communications, and measurement of adoption and business value realization.
Facilitate complex program scheduling and interdependency tracking across multiple streams, ensuring critical path visibility and proactive mitigation of schedule slippage.
Lead continuous improvement initiatives for delivery processes and tools: employ retrospectives, maturity assessments, lessons-learned repositories, and process automation to increase predictability and throughput.
Ensure quality assurance and release management practices are integrated into delivery plans to minimize production incidents and reduce rework while preserving speed to market.
Translate high-level strategic imperatives into executable delivery plans and release roadmaps, decomposing strategy into prioritized backlogs, milestones and acceptance criteria.
Act as the senior escalation point for major incidents and customer-impacting issues; coordinate incident response, root-cause analysis, remediation plans and communication to stakeholders.
Build and present concise, data-driven executive reporting and status updates that synthesize portfolio health, financials, risks, and recovery plans for leadership and board-level audiences.
Partner with HR to define onboarding, career frameworks and competency models for delivery roles; promote a culture of accountability, continuous learning and servant leadership.
Ensure compliance with internal controls, audit requirements, regulatory obligations and industry standards relevant to project delivery and data handling.
Champion strategic initiatives such as digital transformation, cloud migrations, or large-scale IT modernization by aligning delivery capabilities and sequencing work for minimal disruption.
Drive stakeholder alignment and expectation management across customers, business sponsors and executives to maintain trust, reduce scope creep and secure timely decisions.
Implement and govern program-level contractual obligations, change order processes, dispute resolution mechanisms and performance-based incentives tied to delivery outcomes.
Oversee post-implementation reviews and benefits realization assessments to validate outcomes against business cases and capture learnings for future programs.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Provide guidance on delivery-related tooling, dashboards and metrics to enable self-service reporting across teams.
Support training programs for delivery tools, templates and governance processes.
Assist legal and procurement with vendor onboarding documentation and delivery-specific contract clauses.
Participate in organizational change planning, including communications and stakeholder readiness assessments.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Program and Portfolio Management: proven experience managing multi-year, multi-stream portfolios and enterprise programs with complex dependencies.
PMO Design and Governance: ability to create and run a delivery PMO including standards, gating processes, and reporting frameworks.
Agile at Scale / Hybrid Methodologies: deep knowledge of Agile frameworks (SAFe, Scrum, Kanban) and how to tailor hybrid models to enterprise contexts.
Financial Management & Budgeting: ownership of program budgets, forecasting, cost control, benefits realization and P&L implications.
Risk, Issue & Dependency Management: mature risk taxonomy, mitigation planning, and cross-program dependency resolution capabilities.
Vendor & Contract Management: negotiating SOWs, managing SLAs, and driving vendor performance and commercial accountability.
Resource & Capacity Planning: tools and methodologies for forecasting demand, balancing capacity and optimizing utilization.
Delivery Tooling & Metrics: expertise with JIRA, Confluence, MS Project, Smartsheet, ServiceNow, or equivalent delivery and reporting platforms.
Release & Deployment Management: coordination of releases, cutovers, rollback strategies, and post-release validation.
Data-Informed Decision Making: ability to use analytics and dashboards to guide prioritization, forecasting, and executive reporting.
Change Management: planning and executing stakeholder adoption, communications, and training tied to delivery outcomes.
Regulatory & Compliance Awareness: familiarity with controls required for SOX, GDPR, HIPAA or industry-specific regulations where applicable.
Contractual & Commercial Acumen: structuring commercial models, incentives and handling change orders.
Technology Delivery Knowledge: understanding of software development lifecycles, infrastructure and cloud migration delivery nuances.

Soft Skills

Executive Communication: concise, persuasive reporting and presentation skills for C-suite and board-level stakeholders.
Strategic Thinking: ability to connect delivery plans to long-term business strategy and measurable outcomes.
Leadership & People Development: coaching, mentoring and building high-performing cross-functional teams.
Stakeholder Management & Influence: building alignment across senior leaders, sponsors, and customers without direct authority.
Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: pragmatic prioritization and trade-off decisions when information is incomplete.
Negotiation & Conflict Resolution: resolving scope, commercial and resource conflicts constructively.
Problem-Solving & Systems Thinking: diagnosing root causes and creating end-to-end solutions that prevent recurrence.
Adaptability & Resilience: leading teams through change, ambiguity, and challenging delivery situations.
Facilitation & Consensus Building: running effective workshops, steering committees, and decision forums.
Coaching & Talent Growth: developing project delivery competencies and career paths within the organization.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Business, Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology or a related field.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree such as MBA, MSc in Project Management, or a technical master’s relevant to the industry.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Business Administration / Management
Project Management
Computer Science / Software Engineering
Information Systems / IT Management
Engineering (Civil, Electrical, Systems)
Finance / Economics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 10–18+ years of progressive experience in program, portfolio, or large-scale project delivery with increasing leadership responsibility.

Preferred:

8+ years leading managers of project managers and/or running PMOs.
Demonstrated delivery of multi-year enterprise transformation programs or large IT/technology rollouts.
Prior experience managing budgets in the tens of millions, multi-vendor ecosystems, and global delivery teams.
Relevant certifications such as PMP, PgMP, PRINCE2 Practitioner, SAFe Program Consultant (SPC), or related Agile certifications are highly desirable.