Senior Manager, Portfolio & Delivery

Our Story

About You

You are a high achiever looking to thrive in a fast-paced environment. You take pride in your own work but are comfortable collaborating with a team of highly motivated individuals. You can communicate clearly and concisely with teammates and clients, and you enjoy strong company culture and camaraderie. You can navigate multiple corporate functions, including global lines of service and corporate centers of excellence. You possess strong interpersonal skills and are willing to take on diverse tasks to achieve the team’s common goal. You value personal and professional growth and are ready to take the next step in advancing your career.If this sounds like you, well, then you will love the culture at Avison Young!

About Us

Avison Young is a global commercial real estate brokerage and advisory firm, offering transaction, management, financial and consulting services. We’ve designed our corporate structure to best serve our clients by enhancing collaboration across our organization. Real estate can have an enormous positive impact on people’s lives – and we’re in the business of making spaces and places work better for people. Our purpose is to create real economic, social and environmental value as a global real estate advisor, powered by people. We care about each other and we have each other’s backs. This makes Avison Young a great place to be a client, and a great place to work. We support the whole person and their complete wellness – economic, mental and physical – because what’s best for our business comes from our people bringing their whole selves to work.

Of course we love it here, but outsiders think we’re pretty great too! Avison Young has been recognized as one of Canada's Best Managed Companies for the 15th year in a row, with a Platinum Club designation!

Overview

The Senior Manager, Portfolio & Delivery executes the IT, business process and platform change programs defined by Global IT. Global IT sets the strategy, standards and change agenda; this role plans, resources and delivers against it across our core platforms for CRM, finance, HR, service delivery and data & AI, and the process changes that go with them.

Working day to day with the CRM, Finance and Service Line Platform Leads, and alongside regional and service line leadership, Finance, HR, Operations and our outsource partner, the postholder runs delivery governance and keeps the change agenda honest: clear scope, realistic dependencies, visible risk, and benefits that are measured rather than assumed.

Where priorities or capacity cannot be reconciled, they present the options and a recommendation to the VP, Enterprise Architecture for decision.

The base salary is aligned with market data and is estimated to be between $125,000 to $155,000 with the ability to achieve additional compensation through a bonus. This salary range reflects base compensation for the position across all Canadian locations. Within this range, individual pay is determined by work location and other factors, including relevant education/training, experience, and internal equity. This posting is for an existing vacancy withing our organization.

Responsibilities

Delivery portfolio management and governance

• Maintain the delivery portfolio for the change programs defined by Global IT —objectives, sponsors, scope, cost,timingand dependencies.
• Act as the single point of execution across cross-related initiatives, working with the Platform Leads so that programs touching the same platforms, processes or people are delivered as one coherent effort.
• Plan the approved agenda against delivery capacity, businessreadinessand platform dependencies, surfacing conflicts early and recommending trade-offs where the plan is over-committed.
• Run the delivery governance defined by Global IT — stage gates, change control and escalation — and prepare investment approvals for decision.
• Maintain the integrated roadmap and dependency map across platforms, regions and service lines, and act early where dependencies slip.
• Track portfolio budget and spend with Finance, with clear variance commentary.

Transformation delivery

• Lead end-to-end delivery of the change programs defined by Global IT, from mobilization through benefits realization to closure.
• Apply the Global IT delivery standards — business cases, plans, RAID logs, status reporting, qualitygatesand closure reviews — proportionate to size and risk.
• Identifyand resolve risks,issuesand interdependencies early, escalating with clear options and a recommendation.
• Coordinate delivery resources across internal teams, our outsource partner and third-party implementation partners.
• Hand solutions cleanly into support, with documentation, training and ownership agreed before go-live.

Team leadership and capability

• Lead a team of Project Managers as direct reports, supplemented by designated resources from the business, other areas of Global IT and our outsource partner for the duration of an initiative.
• Allocate and flex the team across overlapping initiatives, reallocating quickly when priorities move.
• Set clearobjectivesand delivery standards, coach the team, and manage performance and development.
• Get the best from designated resources who do not report into this role — agreeing what they will deliver and holding them to the same standards as the core team.
• Supplement the team with contract or partner resource where demand exceeds capacity.
• Take the project manager role personally on a workstream or initiative where scale, criticality or capacity makes that the right call, while continuing to hold the wider portfolio.

Stakeholder engagement

• Partner closely with the CRM, Finance and Service Line Platform Leads and the Business Partners within Global IT, aligning delivery plans,resourcingand release timing, and escalating competing demands that cannot be resolved between them.
• Translate the Global IT change agenda into clearly scoped initiatives, and delivery reality back into plain language for leadership audiences.
• Prepare portfolio dashboards, decisionpapersand progress updates, and present them to leadership forums.
• Facilitate workshops, design reviews and prioritization sessions with business and technology participants.
• Agree business ownership, resource commitment and sign-off at each stage, and confirm scope changes through the agreed change control route.

Reporting,riskand benefits

• Provideaccurate,timelyreporting across the portfolio — progress, spend, risk and dependencies — flagging problems early rather than at the point of failure.
• Manage portfolio-level risk and issue tracking, including cross-program risks that no single initiative owns.
• Track benefits through to realization and report honestly where they are not being achieved.
• Produce a single portfolio reporting pack for leadership.
• Use data to challenge assumptions, surface delivery trends and improve estimating and planning over time.

Change, adoption and partner management

• Ensure every initiative has a proportionate change and adoption plan covering communications, training,readinessand post-go-live support.
• Work with business process owners so that process decisions sit with the business and technology delivery supports them, rather than the other way round.
• Monitor adoption after implementation and drive corrective action where usage or data quality falls short.
• Manage delivery performance of implementation partners and the outsourced technology provider against agreed scope,milestonesand quality expectations, working with Procurement and Legal where commercial or contractual matters arise.
• Continuously improve portfolio and delivery practice — templates, cadence,toolingand reporting — keeping it as light as it can safely be.

Qualifications

Essential

• A track recordof running several overlapping, interdependent projects or programs at once without losing control of scope,scheduleor quality.
• Excellent reporting discipline — clear,accurate, decision-ready reporting, and an honest account of status rather than an optimistic one.
• Strong risk,issueand dependency management, particularly where risks sit between projects rather than within one.
• Experience leading project managers directly while also getting delivery from designated resources who report elsewhere — in the business, in other technology teams, or with an outsource partner.
• Familiarity with one or more major enterprise platforms — CRM, finance or ERP, HR, professional services automation, or data and analytics — enough to challenge plans and estimates credibly. Deepexpertisein any one is notrequired; domain depth sits with the Platform Leads.
• Clear written and verbal communication, able to make complex change understandable to a leadership audience.

Desirable

• Experience in commercial real estate or another professional services environment with a partner or principal-led culture.
• Commercial and financial confidence — budget management, forecasting and benefits tracking.
• Comfortable adapting the delivery approach to the problem, whether structured, agile or a mix of the two.
• Experience working across a North American and international footprint, including multi-currency and multi-entity considerations.
• Familiarity with an outsourced or managed service delivery model and the governance it requires.
• Exposure to control and compliance environments such as SOX readiness, ISOstandardsor privacy legislation.
• Working knowledge of AI and automation and how they are practically applied to business process improvement.
• Bilingual English and French.

Education and qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in business, technology, finance or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• A program,projector portfolio management certification (PMP,PgMP, MSP, PRINCE2 orSAFe) is an asset, as is a change management certification such asProsci.

Workplace Type

On-Site

Our Equal Opportunity Commitment

Avison Young practices as an equal opportunity employer in all services locations around the world. We are committed to building and maintaining a workforce diverse in experience, skills and knowledge with uniformity in service excellence, commitment and integrity.

The firm maintains a strict policy to ensure employment opportunities are equal and do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, creed, age, sex, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, disability, marital and civil partnership/union status, protected veteran or military service status, or any other elements protected by law.

Avison Young welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available upon request for candidates during the recruitment process. For those requiring assistance, information relating to the need for accommodation and accommodation measures will be addressed confidentially.

Avison Young is committed to employing the best talent with the most fair and equitable recruitment practices.