Director, Program Management Office; PMO

Commence is a rapidly scaling healthcare data and technology company serving federal, state, and commercial health markets. We support agencies including CMS, the VA, DHA (TRICARE), and the IRS across quality improvement, program integrity, medical documentation, independent dispute resolution, and large-scale data transformation. Our contract portfolio is growing quickly, and we are building the delivery infrastructure of a significantly larger organization.

This role is central to that build.

The Director of PMO leads program management as a discipline at Commence and reports to the Chief Operating Officer. This role stands up and leads the PMO as a matrixed shared service supporting Executive and Program Directors across the portfolio of federal and commercial programs, maintains the delivery methodology and the standards and artifacts PMs work from, coordinates the program health and status inputs that feed enterprise reporting, and develops the project management bench itself.

This role coordinates closely with Project Controls, the Executive and Program Directors, and the technical delivery organization, and feeds program health inputs to Project Controls.

This is a builder's seat. The stage gates, delivery review cadences, and standardized PM artifacts exist today in partial or founder-built form. The incoming Director will inherit a working portfolio from the VP of Operations moving into a more focused delivery role, take responsibility quickly, run the PMO, and scale it to support a business that intends to sustain its current high growth trajectory.

• Establish and run the PMO as a shared service: standards, templates, artifacts, tooling, and cadences used by every program in the portfolio.
• Maintain and continuously improve the delivery methodology, including the Program Director / Project Manager / Technical Delivery Manager operating model, stage gates, and delivery quality reviews, in coordination with the Program Directors and the technical delivery organization.
• Define assurance and improvement practices: root cause analysis on delivery misses, corrective action tracking, and lessons learned that change behavior.

• Run the delivery review cadence and safeguard the integrity of the PM-sourced data behind it: schedule, delivery risk, and issue status across the portfolio.
• Supply timely, accurate program health inputs (milestone status, estimates at completion, forecast drivers) to Project Controls on a defined cadence and in a defined format, developed in collaboration with the account's Program Director where one exists. Project Controls is responsible for the forecast and the enterprise program reporting leadership runs the business on; accuracy and timeliness of these inputs are non-negotiable.

• Manage, develop, and deploy the shared project manager and project coordination bench across programs in a matrixed model. PMs execute within programs under Program Director direction; this role is responsible for their craft, growth, staffing assignments, and performance.
• Recruit and onboard PM talent ahead of portfolio growth, including surge needs on new contract awards.
• Coordinate with the Executive and Program Directors and the technical delivery organization in support of overall delivery. Project Managers and Technical Delivery Managers are peer delivery roles with distinct reporting lines: the PMO develops and staffs the Project Manager bench, while Technical Delivery Managers sit within the technical delivery organization. This role does not direct the Executive or Program Directors.

• Coordinate approvals routing and workflow triage across delivery, ensuring items…