Associate Director, IT Portfolio & Demand Management

Company Description

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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.

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.