Senior Business Project Lead

Job Summary

UBC is undertaking a multi-year Student transformation project focused on improving specific priority functions that support the graduate student experience across UBC Vancouver and Okanagan campuses. This academically funded initiative seeks to modernize targeted business processes, support effective decision‑making, and provide technologies to better support graduate students, faculty, and staff within UBC's complex operating model. The Senior Business Project Lead is accountable for maximizing business value and outcomes for this major enterprise transformation initiative.

The role focuses on business process transformation, value realization, and governance, ensuring that every requirement and decision is anchored in measurable benefit and strategic alignment.

The Senior Business Project Lead works within a cross‑functional project team and reports directly to the Senior Manager, Constituent Engagement Platforms. The role receives strategic business direction from the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (G+PS) and the College of Graduate Studies Business Leadership Team, including the Assistant Vice‑Provost, Strategic Academic Initiatives;
Assistant Dean, Strategic Technologies & Business Initiatives; and other designated senior academic and administrative leaders. The role operates within a matrix delivery environment, collaborating closely with the Project Manager for tactical delivery coordination, timelines, and milestones. The Senior Business Project Lead also works in partnership with UBC IT enterprise teams such as the PMO, Integrations, Enterprise Architecture, Identity & Access Management, Privacy & Security, and Enterprise Data Governance to ensure alignment with institutional standards, regulatory requirements, and long‑term sustainability.

• Plan, organize, manage, and oversee business transformation and analysis activities, ensuring alignment to approved outcomes, value realization goals, and governance expectations.
• Lead foundational analysis for complex initiatives: synthesize disparate data points from decentralized stakeholders to identify root causes, data silos, and process bottlenecks, producing clear, decision‑ready problem statements prior to solution design.
• Understand and apply business architecture concepts to ensure strategic alignment with organizational goals, outcomes, and business value; inform prioritization, scope trade‑offs, and sequencing decisions across phases.
• Recommend and support governance and stakeholder working‑group structures; facilitate discovery, analysis, and consensus‑building that informs future‑state design and executive decision‑making.
• Lead current‑state assessment and future‑state design activities, identifying transformation opportunities and gaps, and advising on practical pathways to achieve the approved future state.
• Own and develop business requirements and decision frameworks that clearly articulate policy intent, outcomes, and constraints, enabling downstream derivation of functional and technical requirements.
• Partner with architects to ensure architectural decisions align with approved business outcomes, scope boundaries, and value priorities.
• Guide the development and validation of process and data artifacts, ensuring they accurately reflect approved business rules, decisions, and future‑state intent.
• Collaborate with integration architects to define business integration needs, decision points, and downstream impacts, supporting coherent end‑to‑end workflows.
• Lead preparation of business scope, requirements, and evaluation criteria for RFPs, ensuring clarity of outcomes, assumptions, and boundaries.
• Participate in developing RFP scoring mechanisms and facilitating and managing the scoring processes.
• Develop and present options, trade‑offs, risks, and advantages to support informed executive decision‑making.
• Partner with Change Management resources to execute stakeholder engagement, impact assessment, and readiness activities, ensuring business units are prepared for adoption.
• Provide business leadership for user acceptance activities and accept delivered solutions as meeting…