Manager, PMO & Strategic Initiatives

Manager, PMO & Strategic Initiatives

Location: 5160 Yonge Street, North York, Ontario (hybrid) · Type: Full-time · Reports to: Director, Operational Effectiveness & Communications

About Q Wealth Partners

Q Wealth Partners is one of Canada's largest independent Portfolio Management firms, with nearly $10 billion in assets and 30+ partner offices across the country. As a registered Portfolio Manager, we hold ourselves to a fiduciary standard: acting in our clients' best interest at all times.

Our model is built on partnership. Independent advisory firms join Q Wealth as Partners, keep their own brands, and rely on our shared investment, operations and technology platform so they can spend their time with clients.

About the role

We're looking for a hands-on Manager, PMO & Strategic Initiatives to run our most important projects and build the way Q Wealth delivers them. This is a builder role: you'll lead real work from day one while setting up a practical project office that helps us execute, not one that adds paperwork.

You'll report to the Director, Operational Effectiveness & Communications, and work closely with the COO, senior leaders and teams across Marketing, Engineering, Core Admin and Client Services, and PM Services. Our projects span technology modernization, operational efficiency, partner transitions, regulatory change, AI adoption and new business.

You'll do well here if you like being in the room when priorities are set and in the details when work gets delivered. This is a new function, so not everything will be defined on day one. That's part of the job: you'll figure out what's needed, build it and get it moving.

Lead our priority projects (about 60% of your time)

• Serve as project manager and delivery lead for the firm's highest-priority initiatives, across business transformation, technology modernization, operational efficiency, regulatory change, AI adoption and new business enablement
• Define scope, objectives and success criteria with project sponsors
• Build and manage project plans, timelines, budgets, resources and dependencies
• Facilitate working sessions and stakeholder meetings, and keep decisions and action items moving
• Track risks, issues and action items, and escalate blockers early with a plan to fix them
• Coordinate delivery across departments and hold owners to their commitments
• See projects through to completion and adoption

Build a practical PMO (about 25%)

• Develop project management standards and templates teams will actually use
• Establish project intake and prioritization processes
• Put governance and status reporting in place that's sized to each project, not one heavy process for everything
• Standardize project documentation, so anyone can pick up a project and know where it stands
• Set up simple stage gates and project reviews for larger initiatives
• Keep one portfolio view of all strategic initiatives and the capacity behind them
• Coordinate resource planning across departments, and show leadership project demand against delivery capacity
• Track partner transitions in the portfolio and make sure every supporting team is engaged, while the Transitions team leads delivery
• Flag competing priorities and recommend trade-offs

Report to leadership (about 15%)

• Prepare monthly executive project reports and deliver portfolio updates to senior leadership
• Build executive dashboards and project scorecards
• Track strategic initiative progress against corporate objectives
• Report on project health, budget, risks and milestones
• Recommend corrective action when a project goes off track
• Use AI tools to build reporting, dashboards and visuals faster
• Improve how we work (ongoing)
• Identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies across the organization
• Lead process redesign initiatives
• Strengthen project delivery habits across teams
• Introduce automation and workflow improvements where they make sense
• Build a culture where commitments are clear, owned and met, and where we keep getting better

As we grow

• Mentor project managers and project coordinators as the PMO team grows
• Build project management skills across departments
• Set best practices for project planning and execution
• Shape a PMO that scales with the firm

Qualifications

Required Experience

• 7+ years of project or program management, leading complex initiatives across several teams
• A track record of delivering both business and technology projects
• Experience working with executives: you can give a clear update, push back with data and get a decision
• A self-starter mindset: you see what needs doing and get it moving without waiting for a playbook
• Comfort with ambiguity: you can bring structure to fuzzy problems, shifting priorities and a function that's still being built
• Strong planning and organization, and the follow-through to close things out
• Strength in project leadership, portfolio management, change management, stakeholder management and risk management
• Strong communication skills: you can explain complex work simply, tailor your message to executives and teams, and keep everyone informed and on the same page

Preferred Experience

• Experience in wealth management, financial services, fintech or another regulated industry
• Familiarity with Portfolio Manager firm operations, custodians such as NBIN, or platforms such as D1g1t
• Experience setting up or improving a PMO or project intake process
• PMP and/or an Agile certification
• Process improvement training such as Lean Six Sigma
• Hands-on experience with Monday.com or Jira

Why Q Wealth

• The chance to build: you'll shape how a growing firm runs its biggest work, with direct access to senior leader.
• Work that matters: our projects change how partner offices, advisors and clients experience Q Wealth.
• Compensation: competitive salary plus an annual bonus.
• Ownership: the opportunity to join our employee ownership program after one year of service.
• Benefits and time off: a comprehensive health and wellness package, vacation days and global flex days.
• Growth: support for professional designations and ongoing development.
• Flexibility: Working at our head office in North York, this position is eligible to work from home up to 3-4 days per week on a permanent basis with the aid of the best technology, cyber security, and cloud-based platforms.