Network Delivery Manager – Strategic Projects & Portfolio at World Animal Protection

• This role is part of the Network Delivery Unit and is central to maintaining pace, alignment, and accountability in how we deliver change. It supports project leads, facilitates Steering Groups, and ensures delivery momentum across our priority work. This role provides enabling structures, tools, and challenge to help others deliver successfully.

Key Responsibilities:

• Act as a core delivery partner in the annual strategic planning cycle, ensuring that global goals translate into coherent and achievable project portfolios. Support teams to turn strategy into deliverables.
• Provide portfolio-level oversight across strategic and operational projects, identifying risks, blockers, and misalignments early and enabling timely course correction.
• Directly manage key strategic projects that strengthen network-wide planning, delivery and performance.
• Support and coach project leads on operational or tactical projects to define clear, achievable deliverables, map responsibilities, and maintain delivery pace. Bring constructive challenge where needed.
• Continuously improve and embed an effective delivery cadence across the network, ensuring project meetings, steering meetings, and planning check-ins drive pace, accountability, and action.
• Shape and guide Project & Priority Group discussions to focus on strategic alignment, cross-cutting delivery challenges, and resourcing decisions across the project portfolio.
• Embed consistent use of core delivery tools and frameworks – including the project based approach templates, and tools across the Microsoft landscape – to ensure alignment, visibility, and shared accountability.
• Work closely with the Director of Strategic Planning, Delivery & Performance and the Network
• Delivery Portfolio Manager to synthesise insights across the portfolio, feeding into strategic reporting and identifying systemic issues.
• Provide insight and foresight by identifying patterns across projects, including capacity constraints, common blockers, or recurring delivery risks—feeding this into global planning or resourcing conversations.
• Bring strategic challenge to project scoping and resourcing, helping teams avoid over-commitment and ensuring planned work is feasible, phased, and aligned to strategic goals.
• Contribute to continuous improvement of our planning and delivery systems, using feedback from the project portfolio to evolve our frameworks, templates, and related sequencing.
• Uphold and advocate for the delivery principles set out in the Implementation Brief: light structure, shared responsibility, learning by doing, and enabling others.
• Model and champion a culture of collaboration, pace, and continuous improvement across the global delivery network, enabling learning and knowledge-sharing between teams and projects.

Key Skills and Requirements for the position:

Key Skill/Requirement Description Essential Desirable

• Proven experience in portfolio and/or programme management in a complex, multi-stakeholder environment
• Strong understanding of project and initiative lifecycles, risk management, and delivery planning
• Experience of direct project delivery at a strategic level 
• Highly developed facilitation and coaching skills, especially in supporting peers to deliver
• Experience of working in ambiguous or dynamic delivery environments, driving clarity and focus
• Ability to synthesise and communicate delivery health, patterns, and issues to senior stakeholders
• Familiarity with collaborative delivery tools (e.g. MS Teams, Planner, slide templates, RAID logs)
• A strong understanding of strategic planning and change delivery in an international context
• Experience working in a global INGO or networked delivery model