Job Title: | Vice President, PMO |
Reports to: | Vice President, Corporate Development & Strategy |
POSITION SUMMARY
Wyse Meter Solutions Inc. provides turnkey submetering and utility expense management services to property managers, building owners, and developers across Canada. Delivering accurate billing, reliable service, and excellent customer experience depends on tight alignment between our strategy, technology, and operations.
About the Role
The VP, PMO leads the project management office and process improvement function, ensuring our most important business and IT initiatives are prioritized, governed effectively, and delivered with clear, measurable outcomes. The VP, PMO will also support integration of acquisitions and support Wyse’s strategic planning process.
Reporting to the Executive VP, Corporate Development & Strategy, the VP, PMO establishes and maintains enterprise standards, tools, and governance for how projects are prioritized, governed, and reported across Wyse, including technology, digital, and data initiatives, The role partners with IT, which retains accountability for solution design, technical standards, architecture, engineering practices, and security.
The role oversees an integrated portfolio of projects and programs, supports project leaders in removing roadblocks, and sponsors process improvements that simplify how we work, strengthen controls, and enhance quality and customer experience.
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES
PMO & Portfolio Oversight
- Own the enterprise portfolio process and maintain a consolidated view of all business and IT projects, ensuring alignment with Wyse’s strategy, priorities, and delivery capacity.
- Define and maintain PMO standards, tools, and governance (e.g., intake, prioritization, status reporting, risk/issue management).
- Ensure architecture, security, and data privacy reviews by IT are completed before technology, digital, and data initiatives are prioritized or funded. Work with sponsors and business owners to define project objectives, scope, timelines, and success measures.
- Provide portfolio insights and recommendations to support executive decision-making on prioritization, resourcing, and investment trade-offs.
- Oversee project-level budgets and forecasts across the portfolio in partnership with Finance and the accountable executive, providing visibility to planned versus actual spend on major initiatives.
- Apply governance proportionate to project risk complexity, and size, using the appropriate stage-gated or iterative approach.
- Define and report portfolio delivery metrics covering throughput, cycle time, schedule and cost predictability against baseline, scope change rate, and escaped defects.
- Operate a quarterly portfolio planning cycle aligned to release and delivery cadence, with monthly reprioritization for in-flight work.
- For iteratively initiatives, govern outcomes, funding, and dependencies at the portfolio level; backlog content, sequencing, and definition of done remain with the accountable product or business owner.
- Maintain a single system of record for portfolio and project status, with the enterprise Atlassian toolset as the authoritative source for technology delivery.
Operational Strategy & Continuous Improvement
- Set long-term strategic and operational priorities for the PMO and process improvement functions, ensuring the team is structured and resourced to deliver the project pipeline.
- Support project leaders in delivering agreed outcomes within approved cost, schedule, and quality tolerances, acting as the escalation point for major issues, risks, and cross-functional dependencies.
- Lead the process improvement agenda, directing teams to deliver initiatives that materially improve efficiency, quality, and customer experience.
- Define and maintain standardized business processes across functions, ensuring clear ownership, handoffs, and adoption. Partner with IT on Security controls, technical change control, and segregation of duties within production systems. PMO governs business readiness, cutover, and post-implementation adoption.
- Own requirement standards and business analysis capability for enterprise initiatives, ensuring requirements are documented, testable, traceable to the business case, and signed off by the accountable business owner before build begins.
Risk Management & Strategic Initiatives
- Maintain the enterprise view of portfolio and delivery risk in a single register, with named owners and monitored mitigation plans.
- Ensure major initiatives have agreed-upon business cases, defined benefits and success measures, prior to approval; track and validate benefits using data using source-systems or enterprise platform data.
- Establish project quality assurance at the portfolio level - gate criteria, evidence requirements, and independent health checks. IT owns engineering standards, code quality, and technical documentation; the PMO assures compliance with those standards.
- Govern the delivery performance of implementation partners and vendors on major initiatives, including scope, milestones, acceptance criteria, and issue escalation.
- Conduct post-implementation reviews on all major initiatives within an agreed period after go-live, reporting realized versus forecast benefits.
People Leadership & Stakeholder Management
- Lead, coach, and develop the PMO team and process improvement teams; set clear goals, expectations, and development plans.
- Promote cross-functional collaboration and clear communication between IT, Operations, Customer and Client Service, Finance, and other teams.
- Build strong relationships with project sponsors and stakeholders; provide solution-oriented guidance on trade-offs and decisions.
- Prepare and present concise portfolio updates, risks, and recommendations to senior leadership and stakeholders.
- Lead organizational change management on major initiatives, including impact assessment, stakeholder communications, training, and post-launch adoption measurement.
Resource Planning
- Develop and maintain a capacity model that identifies constrained skills, aligns portfolio commitments with available delivery capacity, and forecasts resource demand based on project pipelines, timelines, and business priorities.
- Monitor and report capacity, utilization, workload, availability, and variance against agreed target ranges rather than maximum utilization, recognizing that sustained overallocation degrades quality and predictability.
- Identify and resolve resource conflicts and bottlenecks proactively with accountable functional leaders. Allocation of individuals within a function remains with their functional leader; escalate unresolved conflicts with options and impact.
- Maintain an agreed split between project capacity and operational support for each contributing function, and plan the portfolio only against the project allocation.
- Ensure all portfolio requests have an effort estimate validated by the delivering function before committing to a delivery date or communicating externally.
- Apply portfolio work-in-progress limits to keep concurrent initiatives within available agreed capacity, and recommend deferral or stop decisions when limits are exceeded.
- Maintain visibility of implementation partner and contractor capacity as a portfolio lever.
DECISION RIGHTS AND INTERFACES
The VP, PMO owns: portfolio intake, prioritization criteria, stage-gate design, delivery methodology and governance, the consolidated portfolio view, project-level budget reporting, delivery risk, capacity and demand forecasting, business process standardization, the benefits framework, and post-implementation review.
DELIVERY MODEL
Wyse delivers technology through both stage-gated and iterative methods, including AI-assisted development cycles. The VP, PMO is expected to govern both, to match governance depth to project risk, and to avoid applying uniform process weight to work that does not require it. Governance is judged by delivery predictability and outcome quality, not by process compliance.
SUCCESS IN THE FIRST 6 MONTHS
In the first 6–12 months, the successful candidate will establish a clear and effective portfolio governance framework, strengthen project prioritization and delivery predictability, improve visibility into organizational capacity and resources, and build strong cross-functional alignment across business and technology initiatives.
REQUIRED EDUCATION & QUALIFICATIONS
- Post-secondary degree in Business, Engineering, Computer Science, Project Management, or related field.
- Approximately 8–10+ years of project/program management experience in multi-stakeholder environments.
- Demonstrated experience leading project managers and/or a PMO or portfolio function in a formal leadership role.
- Demonstrated experience using project/portfolio tools (e.g., Jira, Confluence, MS Project or equivalent, Excel, PowerPoint).
- Strong planning, organization, and problem-solving skills; able to manage competing priorities and deadlines.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills and the ability to influence and build trust across all levels.
- Demonstrated experience governing both stage-gated and iterative or agile delivery, and adapting governance depth to project risk.
- Demonstrated experience building and operating a capacity and demand model across constrained delivery skills, including forecast accuracy and utilization reporting.
Preferred Qualifications – Ideal to Have
- Project management certification (e.g., PMP or equivalent) strongly preferred.
- Experience working in utilities, energy, infrastructure, SaaS/technology, or other regulated or service-driven environments.
- Experience setting up or maturing a PMO or portfolio governance function.
- Exposure to digital transformation, data/analytics, or customer-facing technology projects.
- Proficiency using approved AI tools in accordance with Wyse’s internal AI usage standard, to improve analysis quality, reporting efficiency, and requirements development.
OTHER COMPETENCIES
- Active learning - seeking and leveraging opportunities to gain new skills, knowledge, and experiences; quickly assimilating and applying new information and skills to enhance results.
- Data literacy – able to interrogate portfolio and operational data directly, and to challenge reported status against source evidence.
- Financial acumen – able to build and defend a business case, and to read variance analysis on project spend.
- Judgment under ambiguity – able to decide with incomplete information and to escalate the right issues at the right time.
DIRECT REPORTS
- This role has direct leadership responsibility for a team of project management and process improvement professionals, currently [5] direct reports, with responsibility for the structure and capability of that team.
WORKING CONDITIONS
- Manual dexterity required to use desktop computer and peripherals.
- Some travel is required within Ontario.
- Overtime as required.
Wyse welcomes and encourages applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available on request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.
All applicants must be legally eligible to work in Canada and our company. The Company does not provide immigration sponsorship or assistance with work authorization. Proof of eligibility to work in Canada and our company will be required upon hire.
