Senior Project Manager, Hazina (ERP) Implementation - WWF International

WWF International global recruitment team are exclusively managing this vacancy. We kindly ask that you do not contact the local office on this position.








As Senior Project Manager – Hazina Implementation, you hold day-to-day delivery accountability for Project Hazina, a strategic initiative to implement a unified, cloud-based Global Finance & Accounting System (GFAS) on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations. The goal of the project is to replace an ageing, fragmented finance systems landscape across more than 30 entities, including the Secretariat and its managed Country Offices. The project will be delivered over approximately two years.


You are accountable for delivering the project within the scope, schedule, budget and quality set by the project governance.


MISSION OF THE DEPARTMENT


To align and harmonise technology, digital and data capabilities across the WWF Network to enable conservation impact at scale while safeguarding the organisation and the people we work with, through fit for purpose solutions that are device and hardware agnostic, mobile functional, built on integrated, secure and scalable cloud enabled technology platforms and are consistently delivered and supported anytime anywhere.


MAJOR FUNCTIONS




Own end-to-end delivery of the Hazina implementation: build and maintain the master plan covering scope, schedule, budget, resourcing, dependencies and stage gates from contract signature through discovery, design, build, test, rollout, stabilisation and decommissioning of legacy systems.






Manage the implementation partner and the wider vendor estate: hold the implementation partner to contracted scope, deliverables, quality and commercials; run change control; and escalate commercial or performance issues through Procurement, Legal and the Executive Sponsor.






Own the project risk profile: identify, quantify and actively mitigate delivery risk — data migration, integration, scope creep, resource availability, adoption and legacy-platform continuity — and give governance bodies an honest view of confidence against milestones.






Steward the investment: manage the approved budget, track spend and forecast against variance, protect the contingency, and report cost position and benefit realisation to the Business Owner, SPOC, the other relevant governance bodies.






Lead business change and adoption: direct the change, communications, training and readiness effort across the Secretariat and Country Offices so that standardised finance processes are understood, accepted and used from go-live, and so that benefits are realised rather than assumed.






Safeguard quality and operational readiness: define acceptance criteria, own the testing and UAT regime, and confirm with Finance, GTDS and Cybersecurity that each release meets architecture, security, control and supportability standards before it is recommended for go-live.




MAJOR DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES


Project planning and delivery management




Develop, own and maintain the integrated Hazina delivery plan — scope, schedule, budget, resources, dependencies, assumptions and stage gates — covering discovery, design, build, configuration, data migration, integration, testing, training, rollout, stabilisation and legacy decommissioning.






Establish the programme team and operating rhythm: define roles, responsibilities and the delivery RACI across WWF and the implementation partner so that accountability for the plan, the budget and the go-live recommendation is unambiguous and the "who owns this" gaps do not arise.






Track progress against milestones and critical path, maintain the RAG position for the Systems Projects Oversight Committee reporting cycle, and proactively drive recovery actions as soon as slippage appears rather than reporting it after the fact.






Operate formal change control over scope, schedule and cost, ensuring every material change is assessed for benefit, risk and funding impact and approved at the right level of governance.




Stakeholder management and governance




Working with the Executive Sponsor and the Business Owner to ensure project governance is appropriately designed, implemented and fully functioning throughout the project lifecycle.








Prepare and present delivery reporting, decision papers and stage-gate submissions for the Systems Projects Oversight Committee, the Executive Team, and other relevant governance bodies for oversight of implementation.






Work with the Executive Sponsor, the Business Owner for Finance, and the GTDS leadership to align competing priorities, resolve escalations, and secure the decisions required to keep the project on track.






Build and hold the confidence of Country Directors, Finance Directors and Country Office focal points where adoption is influenced rather than instructed, and where local finance practice, capacity and connectivity vary widely.






Manage expectations candidly: set out trade-offs between scope, time, cost and quality with the evidence behind them, and hold a defensible position under challenge from senior stakeholders and committee members.




Budget and investment management




Manage the approved Hazina budget end to end: maintain the cost baseline, phase spend across FY27 to FY29, forecast to completion, explain variance and flag overrun risk before it compounds.






Identify and agree with GTDS Platforms and Finance the recurring costs after go-live — licences, environments, hosting, vendor support and integration services — so that they are budgeted and owned before the project closes.






Control the contingency deliberately, with a documented basis for every drawdown, and identify value-engineering and cost-avoidance opportunities with the implementation partner and Microsoft.






Own the benefits realisation plan: baseline the measures behind the assessed non-financial benefits, track them through and beyond go-live, and report realisation honestly to SPOC, the Executive Team and the other governance bodies.




Risk, issue and dependency management




Own the project risk and issue registers, with named owners, mitigations, triggers and target dates; actively manage the exposures that decide project outcomes — data migration and data quality, integration dependencies, scope creep, resource availability, partner performance, user adoption and business continuity.






Maintain the continuity position for the legacy finance systems through decommissioning, so that the organisation is never exposed to an unsupported platform and a partially delivered replacement at the same time, and agree with Finance, Internal Audit and GTDS how historical finance data is archived, retained and kept accessible for audit and reporting after each legacy system is switched off.






Escalate material architecture, data, cybersecurity, data protection, finance policy or compliance matters to the accountable authority — the GTDS Enterprise Solutions and Solution Architecture lead, the Director, Data, AI and Platforms, the Global CISO, the Director of Technology and Digital Services, or Finance leadership — rather than absorbing them within the project.






Ensure the project’s control environment, audit trail and documentation are sufficient for internal and external audit scrutiny at any point in delivery.




Resource, team and vendor management




Resource and mobilise the WWF side of the project: secure workstream leads, business process owners, subject matter experts and Country Office participation, and keep them available against competing operational demands.






Lead a multi-disciplinary, multi-location team without line authority — setting direction, resolving conflict, coaching, and sustaining pace and morale across a two-year delivery in multiple time zones, languages and operating contexts.






Manage the implementation partner day to day: agree and monitor the statement of work, deliverable acceptance, resource profile and rate card; challenge estimates and designs; and hold the partner to schedule, quality and knowledge-transfer commitments.






Work with Procurement and Legal on contract variations, service credits and commercial negotiation, and provide the evidence base for any escalation with the vendor.




Solution quality, data and operational readiness






Work within GTDS technical design authority: solution architecture, integration design and GTDS technology standards are set and approved by the GTDS Enterprise Solutions and Solution Architecture lead. The Senior Project Manager plans and runs delivery against them and escalates any conflict between schedule, cost and standards.






Drive the design and configuration agenda towards a standardised global core in line with the design principles: challenge customisation requests, protect the out-of-the-box position that the business case rests on, and ensure exceptions are justified, costed and approved.






Own the data migration plan with Finance and the Data, AI and Platforms team — scope, cleansing, mapping, reconciliation, dress rehearsals and sign-off criteria — and treat data readiness as a gating condition for go-live, not a parallel activity.






Ensure master data definitions, record identifiers and the system of record for each shared data area — including grants and awards, projects, offices and implementing entities, and budgets and expenditures — are agreed with GTDS data architecture and the Finance data owners, so that Hazina stays consistent with connected systems such as PI360, the grants management system.






Plan the transition of finance reporting and analytics with the GTDS Data, AI and Platforms team: inventory legacy reports and data feeds, agree what moves to Dynamics 365, Power BI or the enterprise data platform, and confirm that core finance, donor and management reporting works before each go-live.






Define acceptance criteria and oversee the full test regime, including integration testing across the connected systems, user acceptance testing with finance users, and the security testing gates required by enterprise standards.






Plan and execute cutover and transition to operations and support with GTDS platform and support teams: support model, runbooks, monitoring, escalation paths, knowledge transfer, hypercare and post-go-live stabilisation, confirming that operational-readiness criteria are met before each entity goes live.




Change management and adoption




Own the change management plan, working with Finance leadership and GTDS learning and adoption: impact assessment by role and entity, stakeholder engagement, communications, training design and delivery, super-user networks and readiness assessment for each wave of the rollout.






Work with Finance leadership and People & Culture on the process and ways-of-working changes that the platform requires, including the process standardisation that underpins future shared-service options.






Measure adoption after each go-live and act on what it shows, so that the efficiency, data quality and control benefits in the business case are actually delivered.






Capture and apply lessons learned across rollout waves, and hand over to the Finance business owner and the GTDS Enterprise Solutions lead, as the business and technology owners of the platform after the project closes, the documentation, capability and governance needed to run and evolve it.




PROFILE


Required Qualifications and Experience.




Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Finance, Computer Science, Information Systems or a related field; a postgraduate qualification or professional finance qualification is an advantage.






Minimum of 10 years' progressive experience in the delivery of enterprise business systems, including at least 7 years in project or programme management roles, of which at least 5 years managing enterprise finance or ERP implementations.






Demonstrated accountability for at least one full-lifecycle ERP or enterprise finance implementation — selection or mobilisation through design, build, migration, testing, go-live and stabilisation — delivered in a multi-entity, multi-currency and multi-country environment.






Experience managing programmes of comparable financial scale and duration, with personal accountability for a multi-million budget, a formal stage-gate governance regime and reporting to executive or board-level committees.






Proven experience directing a major implementation partner, systems integrator or consultancy as client-side lead, including deliverable acceptance, change control and commercial challenge.






Working knowledge of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, or of a comparable enterprise ERP platform, sufficient to challenge design, configuration and estimates credibly; familiarity with the wider Microsoft ecosystem and integration patterns is an advantage.








Sound understanding of core finance processes — general ledger, accounts payable and receivable, fixed assets, budgeting, project and grant accounting, consolidation, treasury and month-end close — and of the control and audit requirements around them.






Recognised project management certification (PMP, PRINCE2 or equivalent) required; an ERP implementation credential and a change-management certification such as Prosci are strongly preferred.






Experience of the non-profit, international development or multilateral sector, including donor and grant-funded environments, is an advantage; experience of federated or membership-based organisations is highly valued.




Required Skills and Competencies




Authoritative delivery leadership: able to hold a large, multi-party project to plan, make decisions with incomplete information, and recover a situation that is drifting.






Strong commercial and negotiation skills, with the confidence to challenge a major consultancy on estimates, scope and quality while keeping the working relationship productive.






Excellent executive communication: concise written papers and clear verbal briefing for board-level committees, alongside plain, practical communication with finance teams in Country Offices.






Analytical and financial rigour: comfortable with cost models, benefit cases, variance analysis and the evidence behind a forecast.






Sound judgement on risk: knows what to resolve, what to escalate, and when a milestone should not be signed off however much pressure sits behind it.






Influence without authority across a federated organization, and the cultural sensitivity to work effectively with colleagues in very different operating contexts.






Resilience and composure over a sustained, high-visibility delivery, with the personal credibility to be trusted by both the Executive Team and the people doing the work.






Full professional proficiency in English; French or Spanish is an advantage.




WORKING RELATIONSHIPS


Internal


Hazina Executive Sponsor and the Finance Business Owner; Global Technology and Digital Solutions (GTDS) leadership and technical teams; the Global Chief Information Security Officer; Finance leadership at the Secretariat and in Country Offices; Procurement, Legal, Internal Audit and People & Culture; the Systems Projects Oversight Committee, the Executive Team, and the Finance & Investment and Audit, Risk and Compliance Committees; Country Directors, Finance Directors and Country Office focal points.


External


Hazina implementation partner and its delivery teams; Microsoft and other platform vendors; third-party consultants and contractors engaged on the project; and providers of integrated services including banking, treasury and payroll.