Senior Programme Lead – One Payroll (SAP S/4HANA)

The Senior Programme Lead will lead the end-to-end delivery of the One Payroll Programme, a strategic digital transformation initiative consolidating payroll systems into a single SAP-based solution. The role involves managing complex multi-stakeholder environments, ensuring quality delivery, risk management, and alignment with strategic objectives.

Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end delivery of the One Payroll Programme, ensuring full alignment with the agreed phased SAP consolidation strategy and overall programme roadmap.
• Drive execution across all phases of the project lifecycle, including initiation, detailed design, build/configuration, data migration, testing, deployment, and post-go-live stabilization, ensuring quality and timeliness of deliverables.
• Ensure deliverables meet defined business requirements, technical standards, and operational readiness criteria, with a strong focus on scalability and sustainability.
• Act as the primary coordination and integration point across TEC, HR, CFO, and Country Offices, ensuring effective collaboration and alignment on priorities, scope, and timelines.
• Support and actively contribute to programme governance structures, including preparing materials for Steering Committees and leadership forums, facilitating decision-making, and ensuring effective escalation of risks and issues.
• Establish and maintain structured communication mechanisms to ensure transparency, manage expectations, and secure stakeholder buy-in across all levels of the organization.
• Ensure strong country engagement model.
• Oversee Change Management and communications ensuring stakeholder buy-in, user readiness and adoption of new payroll processes.
• Develop, maintain, and continuously refine integrated project plans that capture scope, milestones, dependencies, critical path activities, and resource requirements across multiple workstreams.
• Ensure effective scope management through structured requirements gathering, validation, prioritization, and control of change requests.
• Oversee execution of key delivery activities, including data cleansing and validation, system configuration, integration, user acceptance testing, parallel runs, cutover planning, and go-live readiness.
• Monitor and report on delivery performance against established baselines, implementing corrective actions where required.
• Proactively identify, assess, and manage programme risks, including those related to system integration, data quality, compliance, and operational continuity.
• Maintain and regularly update risk and issue registers, ensuring appropriate mitigation and contingency plans are defined and implemented.
• Track and manage cross-functional and cross-system dependencies, ensuring alignment between technical and business workstreams and preventing bottlenecks in delivery.
• Escalate critical risks and issues through governance channels in a timely and structured manner.
• Lead detailed budget planning, forecasting, and financial tracking in line with the approved business case.
• Monitor resource utilization across internal teams and external partners, ensuring optimal allocation and efficiency.
• Identify potential budget deviations and propose corrective measures to maintain financial control and programme viability.

Requirements

• Advanced university degree in IT, Business Administration, Finance, or related field.
• PMP, PRINCE2, Agile or equivalent certification desirable.
• 10-12 years of progressive project/programme management experience.
• Proven experience in large-scale ERP/SAP implementations.
• Experience in Workday, HR/payroll or shared services transformation is highly desirable.
• Experience managing global, multi-stakeholder programmes.
• An understanding of how technology can optimize the work of often geographically distributed groups and teams.
• Familiarity with an international working environment.
• Fluency (level C) in English language.
• Knowledge of Spanish, French or Arabic a strong asset.

Skills

• Project Management
• Programme Management
• ERP Implementation
• SAP S/4HANA
• Workday
• HR Payroll Transformation
• Shared Services Transformation
• Stakeholder Management
• Digital Transformation
• Risk Management
• Strategic Alignment
• PMP Certification
• Prince 2 Certification
• Agile Methodologies
• Global Programme Management

Languages

English, Spanish, French, Arabic