Company Description
By working at Harvard University, you join a vibrant community that advances Harvard's world-changing mission in meaningful ways, inspires innovation and collaboration, and builds skills and expertise. We are dedicated to creating a diverse and welcoming environment where everyone can thrive.
Why join the Harvard Kennedy School?
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University is one of 12 graduate and professional schools at the university. Harvard Kennedy School’s mission is to improve public policy and leadership so people can live in societies that are more safe, free, just, and sustainably prosperous. By combining cutting-edge research, the teaching of outstanding students, and direct interaction with practitioners, we have an impact on solving public problems that no other institution can match. When you work at Harvard Kennedy School, you make a difference.
Job Description
The Associate Director, IT Portfolio & Demand Management leads Harvard Kennedy School IT's (HKSIT) department-wide portfolio governance, demand-management, and quarterly planning practices. Working closely with the CIO, Director of Strategy & Innovation, and HKSIT leadership, the role translates School and departmental priorities into an integrated portfolio spanning strategic initiatives, projects, major operational commitments, service improvements, and approved institutional demand. Across this portfolio, commitments are clearly defined with accountable owners, expected outcomes, target dates, dependencies, capacity decisions, and regular executive review.
The Associate Director maintains the authoritative view of HKSIT’s material active and proposed work, establishes consistent standards for planning and status reporting, identifies stalled or at-risk commitments, and ensures unresolved issues are brought forward for timely leadership action. The role facilitates decisions about what should start, stop, pause, continue, or be deferred as priorities and organizational capacity change.
This position serves as a strategic integrator across planning, operations, governance, stakeholder engagement, and delivery. It helps HKSIT engage earlier in institutional conversations so that business needs, desired experiences, expected outcomes, and alternatives are understood before an organizational or technology solution is selected.
By connecting early demand and institutional planning with execution, operational support, and outcome review, the role helps leadership understand tradeoffs, remove impediments, and keep commitments aligned with School priorities and available capacity. Through this work, the Associate Director helps HKSIT focus its capacity on the highest-value priorities, execute consistently, and solve the right problems for the School before determining the most appropriate solution.
This is a senior leadership position without direct reports. The Associate Director operates through influence, facilitation, organizational judgment, transparent management processes, and executive escalation. Functional leaders and initiative owners retain accountability for delivery, staffing, and results; the Associate Director ensures that material commitments do not remain ownerless, invisible, indefinitely delayed, or disconnected from a leadership decision.
Key Duties
The Associate Director operates within a clearly defined governance structure that balances strategic oversight, portfolio management, and delivery accountability. The HKSIT Senior Leadership Team establishes strategic direction, aligns enterprise priorities, approves significant resource tradeoffs, and holds leaders accountable for results. The Associate Director translates that direction into an integrated portfolio-management framework by leading demand management, planning, reporting, review, and escalation processes that support timely decisions and make progress, accountability, and follow-through visible. Functional leaders, service owners, and initiative owners retain responsibility for execution, outcomes, staffing decisions within their areas, risk response, and corrective action. Matters requiring cross-functional alignment, significant resource shifts, or changes to strategic priorities are elevated to the HKSIT Senior Leadership Team. Where assigned, project and program managers oversee detailed delivery plans and day-to-day execution for individual initiatives within the broader portfolio framework.
Portfolio Governance, Planning & Organizational Coordination
- Establish and enforce clear portfolio standards for documenting accountable ownership, intended outcomes, priority, status, target dates, dependencies, risks, capacity assumptions, decisions, and measures of success.
- Maintain the authoritative, comprehensive view of HKSIT’s material active and proposed commitments, including strategic initiatives, projects, annual goals, major service improvements, cross-functional operational commitments, and approved institutional demand.
- Provide leadership with concise, decision-oriented reporting on portfolio health, competing priorities, resource pressures, unresolved dependencies, and commitments requiring intervention.
- Identify work that is stalled, inadequately defined, competing for constrained resources, or no longer aligned with organizational priorities, and drive timely review, escalation, reprioritization, or closure.
- Work across HKSIT leadership so that commitments are clearly defined, appropriately sequenced, and aligned with School priorities and organizational capacity.
- Translate priorities established by the CIO and HKSIT leadership into an integrated portfolio, coordinated action, and visible follow-through.
- Maintain a clear record of material portfolio decisions, including work approved, deferred, paused, redirected, or stopped and the rationale for those decisions.
Demand Management & Business Engagement
- Lead and continuously improve HKSIT’s demand-management framework for capturing, clarifying, evaluating, prioritizing, approving, and governing new work.
- Ensure proposed work is evaluated against existing commitments, strategic value, urgency, risk, dependencies, organizational readiness, and available capacity before it is initiated.
- Facilitate early discussions with stakeholders to clarify business needs, desired experiences, intended outcomes, affected populations, dependencies, constraints, and measures of success before implementation approaches are selected.
- Apply Business Relationship Management, business analysis, and Business Process Improvement techniques to evaluate needs through multiple organizational lenses, including process, policy, roles, training, communications, organizational change, data, and technology.
- Develop clear options and recommendations that enable leadership to make informed decisions regarding priority, sequencing, resource allocation, sponsorship, and institutional investment.
- Establish criteria and governance checkpoints that prevent material work from beginning without sufficient definition, ownership, priority, sponsorship, and capacity.
Quarterly Planning & Organizational Accountability
- Lead HKSIT’s quarterly planning and review process, integrating departmental commitments, annual goals, strategic initiatives, major operational work, and emerging demand.
- Facilitate explicit decisions about what should start, continue, pause, stop, or be deferred when priorities, risks, or organizational capacity change.
- Maintain and continuously improve HKSIT’s planning, reporting, and portfolio-management environment using Smartsheet or successor platforms.
- Establish a consistent reporting cadence and clear expectations for leaders and work owners to provide timely, accurate, decision-ready information.
- Convene recurring portfolio and planning reviews that focus on commitments, outcomes, capacity, risks, dependencies, tradeoffs, decisions, and required leadership action rather than status reporting alone.
- Surface missed commitments, unclear ownership, stale status, and unresolved impediments promptly and escalate issues that cannot be resolved through normal coordination.
- Make commitments and progress transparent, recognize accomplishments, and reinforce a culture in which risks are raised early and ownership is clear.
- Work with HKSIT leaders to keep commitments realistic, actively managed, and aligned with available organizational capacity.
Performance, Outcomes & Continuous Improvement
- Analyze data from Smartsheet, project portfolios, operational metrics, ServiceNow, and other systems to identify service pressures, trends, delivery risks, capacity constraints, and opportunities for improvement.
- Develop meaningful portfolio, demand, operational, and outcome metrics that support executive decision-making, organizational planning, and continuous improvement.
- Establish practices for reviewing whether completed initiatives and service improvements achieved their intended business, operational, or institutional outcomes.
- Use outcome reviews, lessons learned, and performance data to improve future prioritization, planning, investment, and delivery practices.
- Design, implement, and continuously improve portfolio management, demand management, planning, governance, reporting, and related operational processes that strengthen HKSIT’s effectiveness.
- Evaluate existing operating models and introduce practical improvements that simplify work, clarify decision rights, strengthen accountability, improve visibility, and increase consistent execution.
Stakeholder Engagement & Organizational Facilitation
- Build productive relationships with stakeholders across Harvard Kennedy School and the broader Harvard community.
- Facilitate conversations that help departments define institutional needs, evaluate alternatives, establish priorities, and build consensus around practical, executable paths forward.
- Help diverse stakeholder groups navigate ambiguity by integrating perspectives from strategy, governance, finance, operations, business processes, communications, organizational change, data, and technology.
- Identify initiatives requiring broader institutional coordination, governance, executive sponsorship, or cross-School decision-making.
- Communicate priorities, decisions, tradeoffs, dependencies, risks, and capacity constraints clearly and constructively.
- Support HKSIT’s continued evolution from a technology service provider toward a strategic institutional partner.
Qualifications
Basic Qualifications
- Minimum of seven years’ post-secondary education or relevant work experience
- A complete application must include a resume and cover letter.
Additional Qualifications and Skills
- Eight or more years of progressively responsible experience in portfolio management, program management, demand management, business relationship management, business analysis, organizational operations, strategy execution, or a related field.
- Demonstrated experience managing complex portfolios that include projects, operational commitments, and cross-functional initiatives.
- Experience developing and operating portfolio management, planning, governance, workflow, prioritization, or organizational reporting processes.
- Demonstrated experience establishing accountability mechanisms, identifying delivery risks, and facilitating timely resolution or executive escalation.
- Strong analytical skills with demonstrated experience using operational and portfolio data to identify trends, risks, capacity constraints, and opportunities.
- Demonstrated ability to facilitate decisions involving multiple stakeholders, competing priorities, limited capacity, and organizational ambiguity.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including preparing concise executive-level analyses, recommendations, decisions, and presentations.
- Experience in higher education or another complex, decentralized organization.
- Experience with Business Relationship Management, Business Process Improvement, business analysis, Lean, organizational change management, IT service management, Agile, or continuous improvement practices.
- Experience using ServiceNow, Smartsheet, or comparable portfolio, service-management, workflow, and reporting platforms.
- Relevant professional certification in portfolio or program management, Business Relationship Management, business analysis, process improvement, organizational change, IT service management, or related disciplines.
- Curiosity, sound judgment, executive presence, comfort operating in ambiguity, and a demonstrated commitment to continuous improvement.
Core Competencies
- Ability to create practical structure and forward movement in ambiguous environments by helping stakeholders clarify problems, surface assumptions, evaluate alternatives, and agree on executable paths forward.
- Strong systems thinking, with the ability to recognize relationships among people, process, governance, technology, data, finance, capacity, and organizational strategy.
- Ability to translate complex organizational issues into clear decisions, accountable commitments, and practical recommendations.
- Demonstrated success influencing organizational outcomes without direct authority while maintaining constructive relationships with senior leaders and diverse stakeholder groups.
- Strong organizational judgment, including knowing when to facilitate discussion, when to recommend a decision, when to challenge incomplete information, and when to escalate an issue requiring executive attention.
- Ability to balance transparency and accountability with a collaborative, solutions-oriented approach.
- Ability to frame issues from an institutional perspective rather than the perspective of a single department, project, service, or technology platform.
- Comfort holding peers and senior colleagues to agreed planning and reporting expectations through clear processes, credible data, and consistent follow-through.
Additional Information
- Visa Sponsorship Information: Harvard University is unable to provide visa sponsorship for this position
- Pre-Employment Screening: Identity, Education, Criminal
- Other Information: This position is based on campus in Cambridge, MA and required to work in person a minimum of 3 days/week.
- Application Instructions: A complete application must include a resume and cover letter.
Work Format Details
This position has been determined by school or unit leaders that some of the duties and responsibilities can be effectively performed at a non-Harvard location. The work schedule and location will be set by the department at its discretion and based upon operational needs. When not working at a Harvard or Harvard-designated location, employees in hybrid positions must work in a Harvard registered state in compliance with the University’s Policy on Employment Outside of Massachusetts. Additional details will be discussed during the interview process. Certain visa types and funding sources may limit work location. Individuals must meet work location sponsorship requirements prior to employment.
Salary Grade and Ranges
This position is salary grade level 059. Please visit Harvard's Salary Ranges to view the corresponding salary range and related information.
Benefits
Harvard offers a comprehensive benefits package that is designed to support a healthy work-life balance and your physical, mental and financial wellbeing. Because here, you are what matters. Our benefits include, but are not limited to:
- Generous paid time off including parental leave
- Medical, dental, and vision health insurance coverage starting on day one
- Retirement plans with university contributions
- Wellbeing and mental health resources
- Support for families and caregivers
- Professional development opportunities including tuition assistance and reimbursement
- Commuter benefits, discounts and campus perks
Learn more about these and additional benefits on our Benefits & Wellbeing Page.
EEO/Non-Discrimination Commitment Statement
Harvard University is committed to equal opportunity and non-discrimination. We seek talent from all parts of society and the world, and we strive to ensure everyone at Harvard thrives. Our differences help our community advance Harvard's academic purposes.
Harvard has an equal employment opportunity policy that outlines our commitment to prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, religion, disability, or any other characteristic protected by law or identified in the university's non-discrimination policy. Harvard's equal employment opportunity policy and non-discrimination policy help all community members participate fully in work and campus life free from harassment and discrimination.