Our client, a leading organization within the Biopharma/Life Sciences industry, is seeking an experienced Senior Project Manager to support a large-scale R&D transformation initiative focused on improving R&D speed, productivity, efficiency, and value realization through AI, data, digital capabilities, and process improvement.
The Senior Project Manager will provide end-to-end strategic and program management support for a portfolio of R&D initiatives. Working closely with Business and Technology Leads, this individual will help translate business opportunities into well-defined value/business cases and drive them from initial idea and assessment through governance, approval, implementation planning, and transition into execution.
This is a highly hands-on role requiring strong knowledge of Biopharma/Life Sciences R&D, technology delivery, AI/data-driven transformation, and complex cross-functional program management.
Key Responsibilities
- Business Case Development: Manage the intake and progression of new R&D opportunities. Partner with Business and Technology Leads to define the business problem, opportunity, scope, expected value, technology needs, dependencies, stakeholders, and implementation considerations.
- Business Case Readiness: Guide teams through the development and refinement of business/value cases and supporting materials, ensuring submissions are complete, appropriately structured, and ready for leadership review and decision-making.
- Strategy & Portfolio Planning: Support leadership in prioritizing and sequencing initiatives, identifying shared capabilities and dependencies, and maintaining alignment with broader R&D transformation objectives.
- Governance & Approvals: Manage initiatives through the governance and approval lifecycle, including preparation for advisory, steering committee, and leadership reviews. Coordinate materials, timelines, pre-reads, decisions, feedback, follow-ups, and required revisions.
- Cross-Functional Technology Coordination: Coordinate across technology and enabling functions to determine architecture, data, AI/ML, security, compliance, delivery, resource, and other requirements needed to progress initiatives.
- Implementation Planning: Translate approved business cases into actionable delivery plans, including scope, milestones, owners, resources, dependencies, risks, governance, funding considerations, and success measures.
- Transition to Execution: Drive structured handoffs from business-case development into execution, ensuring delivery teams have the necessary scope, documentation, decisions, resources, stakeholder alignment, and governance structure.
- Program & Portfolio Management: Maintain an integrated view of multiple initiatives at various stages, tracking milestones, deliverables, decisions, actions, risks, issues, dependencies, approvals, resources, and upcoming governance activities.
- Risk & Dependency Management: Proactively identify issues, cross-functional dependencies, resource constraints, decision points, and delivery risks. Drive resolution and escalate appropriately when needed.
- Meeting & Decision Management: Facilitate working sessions and governance discussions, prepare agendas and materials, capture decisions and actions, assign owners, and drive follow-through to closure.
- Documentation & Reporting: Maintain organized project documentation, trackers, business case materials, decision logs, action items, implementation plans, and executive-level reporting.
- Stakeholder Management: Coordinate across R&D business leaders, technology teams, functional SMEs, program teams, and external vendors/partners, ensuring stakeholders remain aligned on responsibilities, decisions, and next steps.
Ideal Candidate
- 7+ years of Project/Program Management experience, preferably supporting complex enterprise initiatives.
- Strong experience within Biopharma, Pharmaceutical, or Life Sciences R&D environments.
- Experience managing programs involving AI, data, digital transformation, or enterprise technology is highly preferred.
- Demonstrated ability to take initiatives from initial concept/business case through governance, implementation planning, and execution.
- Experience managing multiple initiatives or workstreams simultaneously within a highly matrixed organization.
- Strong understanding of technology delivery and ability to effectively partner with both business and technical stakeholders.
- Experience with executive-level governance, steering committees, and leadership reporting.
- Strong risk, dependency, resource, and stakeholder management skills.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills with the ability to translate complex information into clear, executive-ready materials.
- Highly organized, proactive, and comfortable operating independently in a fast-paced environment.
What We're Looking For
This is not a traditional Project Manager role focused primarily on scheduling meetings and maintaining project plans. The ideal candidate is a proactive, strategic Senior PM who can bring structure to ambiguity, challenge and clarify requirements, drive decisions, and keep complex initiatives moving forward.
The individual should be equally comfortable participating in strategic discussions with senior leadership and getting into the details with project teams to ensure initiatives successfully move from idea → business case → approval → implementation → execution.