Project Director

Job Description

Do you believe that everyone deserves access to affordable, quality healthcare? Are you driven by creativity, bold ideas, and disruptive innovation? Are you inspired by exceptionally talented, diverse, impact-oriented colleagues? Do you thrive in a dynamic, high-growth, fast-paced environment? Most importantly, are you fed-up, even disgusted, with the status quo of foreign assistance in the health sector? Then consider a job with ThinkWell.

ThinkWell is a growing, flexible health systems organization, with both global influence and local grounding. Our focus is on driving transformation in the global health space by always questioning and disrupting conventional wisdom about what works or what can or cannot be done. We believe in pragmatism over ideology and develop solutions tailored to a client’s context and political realities without replicating global models and all-purpose solutions. We know that to drive change, we must focus on how the world could be, rather than making excuses for the status quo.

ThinkWell is looking for a Project Director for our role within the “Advancing Universal Health Coverage” project in Bangladesh. As a partner within a consortium, ThinkWell leads as the incubator providing technical and advisory services for one of the largest social enterprises for health. The focus of ThinkWell’s work is to support the transformation of a nation-wide network of primary health clinics into a sustainable pro-poor for-profit provider of high-quality affordable health care services.

The successful candidate will have a background in health systems strengthening and health financing to support health service delivery in public and/or private sector. In addition, the candidate will bring experience in nimble fail-fast approaches to the design and application of new ideas in service delivery. A key role of the Project Director will be to provide strategic and leadership guidance to the incubator team based on Bangladesh to ensure on time deliverables that exceed expectations. The Project Director also play a key liaison role of coordination across technical and administrative functions internally and with the consortium partners.

The successful candidate will have experience in managing large and complex projects in low and middle-income countries and be prepared to work independently, and as part of one or more high-level distributed teams. Ability and comfort working with remote teams where open, frank, routine communication will be a priority, using calls as well as project team software to build a collaborative environment within the teams.

Responsibilities

Management

• Provides technical oversight, project management and mentoring to project staff based on Bangladesh;
• Support staff development and ensure a collaborative and supportive work environment. This will include facilitation of performance reviews for all line management staff; staff development plans, formative feedback regarding goals, performance and advise on professional development opportunities;
• Maintain outstanding levels of client satisfaction with the project prime partner and accountability for all deliverables.
• Lead the development, implementation, and monitoring of program work plans, budgets and related planning documents, in full collaboration with the respective teams.
• Ensure project compliance with client’s regulation and internal policies. This will include budget monitoring in collaboration with the finance team, hiring of new staff, monitoring of partners with the contract team.
• Coordinate periodic reviews of program progress and redesign or redirect areas of work if they are not likely to achieve program objectives;
• Facilitate communication, engagement, and decision-making across a broad team and within and across the project countries. Manage appropriate communications platforms;

Technical Leadership

• Lead the project team for required assignments and develop sound conceptualization and framing, develop rigorous assessment methodology and ensure exceptional quality of deliverable
• Provide direct technical expertise, in selected areas of the program portfolio; these areas include health financing, health systems, poverty identification and targeting.
• Provides a proactive and informed voice within the consortium of development partners with the project and competently represent the interests of ThinkWell’s role within the project while championing the accomplishments of our team ensuring country ownership and growth of internal champions
• Produce high quality written inputs to reports and presentations, including technical documents, project status reports, policy briefs, and publications for conferences and journals.

Representation and new business

• Represent ThinkWell with all key stakeholders including Ministry of Health, donors, and other non-state actors, on all technical aspects of the project.
• Lead, or participate in, new business engagements, including building relationships with potential funders, both traditional and non-traditional, ideation to design innovations for bid and proposal process, and proposal writing.

Other tasks

• Maintain communications with other ThinkWell project managers in various global locations, for the purposes of technical exchange, knowledge management and dissemination, cross-fertilization, etc., as required.
• Participate in various company initiatives and teams in accordance with the incubator’s areas of interest and the company’s/team’s needs, e.g. staff development/talent management, technical quality assurance, etc.
• Serve as a cultural ambassador for the firm internally and externally;
• Other relevant projects and tasks, as needed.

Qualifications

• Graduate in public health, health economics/financing, public administration, business/management, business administration or equivalent fields
• Minimum of 15 plus years of relevant work experience in health sector development, management consulting firm, bilateral or multilateral development agency, with some of that experience managing operations for low- or middle-income country projects
• Strong project and people manager, with a track record of designing operations and successfully implementing complex programs with multiple partners and workstreams;
• Extensive experience working with ministries of health, as well as with donors and implementers
• Expert level written and verbal communication skills
• Fluent command of English
• Willingness to travel essential, including to low income countries, approximately 15%.

Who you are

• Inspiring leader who models the principles of conscious leadership and embraces facilitation and mentorship as the primary tools for leadership
• Able to rally staff around ThinkWell’s advocacy-oriented and transformative vision
• Possesses a distaste for the status quo of the development sector with a burning desire to catalyze its transformation
• Have a ‘can-do’, ‘anything is possible, ‘start-up’ ethos combined with a strong sense of urgency and action orientation
• Strong believer that traditional, top-down management is a relic of the past and used as a last-resort management tool. Instead, you possess a strong desire to lead with a facilitative and mentoring approach
• Thoughtful systems thinker with grounded, pragmatic understanding of the complexities of achieving development outcomes
• Burning penchant to fearlessly challenge conventional wisdom
• Committed to modeling a work culture that strongly espouses individual authenticity, radical feedback, intelligent failure, and collective impact