Senior Program Manager

Aquent is proud to partner with a major healthcare organization dedicated to improving lives and shaping the future of health. This innovative client is at the forefront of transforming healthcare delivery, focusing on operational excellence and strategic partnerships to achieve its mission. As a vital part of their journey, you will contribute to an enterprise-wide initiative that directly impacts how they collaborate with external partners, ensuring efficiency, compliance, and strategic alignment across all engagements.

Are you a visionary leader passionate about driving large-scale transformation and optimizing critical business processes? We are seeking an exceptional individual to spearhead a pivotal initiative focused on redefining how our client manages its external relationships. This is an unparalleled opportunity to design, align, and pilot a future-state operating model for third-party diligence and vendor onboarding within a vast enterprise environment. Your expertise will be instrumental in creating a more agile, secure, and compliant ecosystem, directly enhancing the organization's ability to innovate and deliver value to its members.

What You'll Do

As the central coordinator for this high-impact program, you will navigate a complex landscape, uniting diverse stakeholders from Legal, Procurement, Information Security, Privacy, Compliance, Data Governance, Vendor Management, and various business units. You will be the driving force behind transforming how external engagements are reviewed, approved, contracted, and governed, establishing new standards of efficiency and accountability. This role offers the chance to lead, influence, and build foundational processes that will have a lasting impact on the organization's operational integrity and strategic agility.

• Serve as the overall program lead for this critical transformation initiative, guiding it from concept to pilot implementation.
• Develop and meticulously manage the program roadmap, workplan, milestones, risks, dependencies, and all stakeholder communications.
• Facilitate high-level executive steering committee meetings, governance forums, and dynamic cross-functional working sessions to drive progress and consensus.
• Champion alignment among a broad spectrum of functional leaders, including Legal, Procurement, Security, Privacy, Compliance, Data Governance, Vendor Management, and business stakeholders.
• Document current-state challenges and design robust future-state processes, governance structures, and operating models.
• Proactively manage competing stakeholder priorities and expertly drive decisions through established governance channels.
• Prepare compelling, executive-ready presentations, status updates, strategic recommendations, and essential decision materials.
• Coordinate pilot activities, meticulously tracking outcomes against defined success criteria to validate new processes.
• Ensure all project deliverables are completed on schedule and meet agreed-upon business objectives, setting the stage for enterprise-wide adoption.
• Design and operationalize a comprehensive cross-functional diligence governance framework, including establishing and facilitating a diligence council and supporting working groups.
• Define clear roles, responsibilities, decision rights, and escalation paths, aligning governance mechanisms with existing Vendor Management workstreams and creating accountability structures for process performance.
• Partner with Legal and Procurement to simplify and standardize contracting workflows, supporting the development of streamlined guidance, pilot agreement approaches, and standardized contractual templates to reduce negotiation cycle times.
• Define review ownership across participating functions, develop service-level targets and performance expectations, and design escalation procedures for unresolved issues and bottlenecks.
• Establish baseline metrics and reporting capabilities, monitoring process performance, cycle times, rework, and stakeholder feedback to lead continuous improvement discussions.
• Recommend process changes based on data-driven insights, ensuring ongoing optimization and efficiency gains.

What You'll Bring

We are looking for a seasoned program leader with a proven track record of driving complex, cross-functional initiatives and a passion for process transformation. Your ability to lead without direct authority, build consensus, and communicate effectively at all levels will be key to your success.

Must-Have Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in program management, process transformation, operating model design, or business transformation.
• Demonstrated success in leading large-scale cross-functional initiatives within large, complex organizations.
• Extensive experience facilitating executive-level and cross-functional governance forums.
• Strong stakeholder management and consensus-building skills, particularly across matrixed organizations.
• Proven experience in designing and implementing business processes that span multiple functional areas.
• Ability to drive projects forward effectively without direct authority over participating teams.
• Exceptional written, verbal, and executive presentation skills.
• Strong organizational, planning, risk management, and problem-solving capabilities.

Nice-to-Have Qualifications

• Experience with third-party risk management, vendor onboarding, supplier governance, procurement operations, legal operations, or compliance programs.
• Experience working alongside Legal, Procurement, Security, Privacy, Compliance, or Data Governance organizations.
• Knowledge of risk-based review frameworks and governance models.
• Experience leading process simplification, cycle-time reduction, and operational efficiency initiatives.
• PMP, PgMP, Lean Six Sigma, Prosci, or similar certification.
• Management consulting or enterprise transformation background.

The target hiring compensation range for this role is $65.16 to $72.41 an hour. Compensation is based on several factors including, but not limited to education, relevant work experience, relevant certifications, and location.

About Aquent Talent:

Aquent Talent connects the best talent in marketing, creative, and design with the world's biggest brands.

Our eligible talent get access to amazing benefits like subsidized health, vision, and dental plans, paid sick leave, and retirement plans with a match. We also offer free online training through Aquent Gymnasium. More information on our awesome benefits!

Aquent is an equal-opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other legally protected characteristics. We're about creating an inclusive environment-one where different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives are valued, and everyone can contribute, grow their careers, and thrive.