Job Description
About this role:
The Senior Manager (SM) leads global project support teams, providing strategic management support to health system strengthening projects throughout the full lifecycle, including business development. The SM is a confident leader and seasoned professional with expertise in global health project management and experience working in a large NGO with USAID-funded projects. The SM position is in MSH’s Center of Project Management Excellence (CPME) in the Program Delivery Group (PDG).
More specifically:
Project Support:
- Supports excellence in program design and implementation in line with MSH’s standards, values, and mission.
- Has a holistic and contextual understanding of all aspects of the project, and provides strategic guidance to the project director, project team, and global MSH staff to establish efficient and effective project management strategies and to solve problems.
- Facilitates collaboration and communication among the project director, portfolio director, CPME support team, technical contributors, and MSH business units.
- Coordinates global MSH support to assigned projects to ensure that the project has the resources and expertise to achieve stated objectives.
- Oversees the project support team and provides leadership and guidance to maximize their contributions to the project.
- Serves as a main contact point about the project and represents the project internally and externally. Serves as the subject matter expert about donor requirements, contractual requirements, and MSH policies and procedures, and provides guidance to the project team to ensure compliance and the use of best practices.
- Provides guidance to projects and directly contributes to deliverables, reports, presentations, and correspondence to donors, clearly describing project results and strategies, including compelling data visualization.
- Monitors performance against indicators in the MERL plan/PMP, workplan implementation progress, execution of the strategic management plan, project quality improvement, financial management, risk management, knowledge management, etc.
Program Delivery Group and Center of Project Management Excellence Management:
- Serves as a member of the PDG management team, and contributes to conceptualizing, leading, and implementing departmental, cross-departmental, and organization-wide initiatives.
- Serves as a senior member in the Center of Project Management Excellence (CPME) and contributes thought leadership to strategic initiatives of the unit, ensuring that CPME maintains standards and consistency across the entire MSH project portfolio, including designing tools, systems, and processes, and creating and delivering staff trainings.
Business Development:
- Serves as a core member of bid teams, providing inputs throughout the business development cycle to ensure the project design and strategies are designed for feasibility and success during implementation, including project management, start-up, risk management, partner and staffing plans, and cost proposal.
- Contributes to the handover from bid to implementation team, and leads pre-award preparations and start-up.
Supervision:
- May be responsible for directly supervising one or more CPME project support staff.
- Mentors and coaches supervisees to help them grow professionally.
- In our matrix environment, provides professional growth opportunities and mentorship to all CPME staff with whom they work.
QUALIFICATIONS
What do you need to apply?
MSH employs people of passion, we seek those individuals who dream of a better world. We look for professionals who combine experience, local knowledge, and an understanding of international best practices.
Specific requirements for this role are:
Education and Experience:
Required: A postgraduate degree in public health, international development, or a field of study relevant to job responsibility is required.
Required:
- 8 years minimum relevant experience required, with increasing responsibility designing and managing global public health or international development programs in an implementing organization and/or funder.
- Experience working in the home office of global nonprofit organizations or funders, with an understanding of organizational financial structures, processes, and business management.
- Experience mitigating risk on complex projects, and resolving complex personnel, financial, compliance, and performance issues.
- Demonstrated experience managing multiple aspects of project start and close phases.
- Experience supervising professional staff.
- Successful experience working in a multicultural, results-driven environment.
Preferred:
- 10 - 15 years minimum relevant experience preferred, with increasing responsibility designing and managing global public health or international development programs in an implementing organization and/or funder.
- Relevant experience working in a lower income country environment on a long-term assignment or multiple shorter duration assignments. Experience working in and familiarity with the context of Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly West Africa, encouraged.
Knowledge and Skills:
Global Project Management:
- Demonstrated understanding and experience in the oversight, management, and implementation of USAID and other donor-funded projects (e.g., CDC, Global Fund, Gates Foundation), including an understanding of donor requirements, trends in donor priorities, and best practices for donor reporting and client relationship management.
- Demonstrated skills ensuring compliance and successful completion of USAID contracts and cooperative agreements, and knowledge of USG requirements and restrictions.
- Proven track record in budgeting and financial management of international projects.
- Demonstrated skills planning, writing, and ensuring the quality of project deliverables, including progress reports, technical reports, and documents, as well as other high-level project correspondence and documentation.
Leadership:
- Experience working successfully in a matrix environment, building professional relationships and communications to collaborate seamlessly with staff on adjacent teams.
- Strong interpersonal skills and a demonstrated capacity to lead global teams and to collaborate with colleagues and partner organizations to achieve results.
- Demonstrated ability to provide relevant advice to senior project management teams, bringing different perspectives (external, client, MSH corporate, etc.). Ability to guide project teams and support teams in navigating processes and systems.
Communication:
- Strong French proficiency preferred, verbal and written.
- Fluency in English required, with exceptionally strong writing and oral presentation skills in English, with experience writing clear and compelling donor reports.
Competencies:
- Strategic and cross-cultural agility, business acumen, cross-cultural sensitivity, comfort communicating with higher management, dealing with paradox, perspective, dealing with ambiguity, attention to detail while understanding the big picture, managing diversity and relationships, motivating others, managing for results, prioritization and time management, organizational resilience.
Physical Demands:
- Up to 20% U.S and international travel
- Basic Office Operations - keyboard use, pulling drawers, lifting papers <10 lbs, etc.
About the Organization
Management Sciences for Health, an international nonprofit organization, is dedicated to closing the gap between what is known and what is done about public health problems. MSH saves lives and improves health by helping public and private organizations throughout the world to effectively manage people, medicines, money, and information. Working from more than 30 country offices and our US headquarters, our staff from 65 nations is highly regarded for its technical expertise, integrity, and commitment to making a lasting difference in health.
Management Sciences for Health (MSH) is a nonprofit international health organization composed of more than 2,000 people from 73 nations. Their mission is to save lives and improve the health of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people by closing the gap between knowledge and action in public health. Together with their partners, they are helping managers and leaders in developing countries to create stronger management systems that improve health services for the greatest health impact.
EXPERTISE
MSH takes an integrated approach to building high-impact sustainable programs that address critical challenges in leadership, health systems management, human resources, and medicines. Simply put, they support stronger health systems for greater health impact.
Their expertise in these areas falls into the broad categories of management functions—for example, leadership and governance or pharmaceutical management—and health areas like tuberculosis or maternal, newborn, and child health. They apply their expertise by
- Partnering with governments, local organizations, and communities in developing nations to build their own capacity for long-term health impact;
- Providing global leadership in critical areas of health management and health care delivery;
- Bringing the best of MSH from around the globe to the people we serve, working as One MSH with a focus on lasting health system improvements.
Leadership, Governance, & Management
They work with in-country partners to build stronger health systems to improve:
- the management and leadership of priority health programs, health organizations, and multisectoral partnerships such as The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, developing a critical mass of managers at all levels of the health system who can lead and inspire teams to achieve results;
- the management systems of health organizations in the public and private sector, transferring practical approaches and skills to ensure that management structures contribute to sustainable organizational success;
- the governance and management of health organizations and multisectoral partnerships, facilitating change and transferring knowledge to enable organizations to administer their resources efficiently and scale up their services.
Health Service Delivery
MSH combines extensive public health expertise, proven service delivery approaches, and evidence-based interventions in five critical areas:
- HIV & AIDS
- Tuberculosis
- Maternal, newborn, and child health
- Family planning and reproductive health
- Other communicable diseases, including malaria and pandemic and avian influenza
Human Resources for Health
MSH helps governments develop multisectoral strategies and policies to plan and manage their health workforces. We use a comprehensive approach that addresses all the facets of human resources for health needed to achieve an adequate supply of well-trained and motivated health workers. MSH offers capabilities in leadership, human resource management, education, partnerships, policy, and finance to achieve these goals.
Pharmaceutical Management
Vital to our success is a participatory approach to project design and implementation, which cultivates broad-based support from all stakeholders. We also build and improve infrastructure and local capacity to effectively purchase, store, deliver, and use quality essential medicines.
Health Care Financing
MSH helps governments and NGOs assess their current financial situation and systems, understand service costs, and develop initiatives to use existing funds more effectively and generate additional revenue—all with the goal of supporting a nation’s health priorities.
Health Information
MSH has developed proven methods for rapidly strengthening the analysis and use of existing health data—normally at the province, district, and facility levels—without revising existing recording and reporting requirements. With an emphasis on learning through action, district teams undertake assessments of health services, identify gaps in performance, and design solutions to support better decision-making and, therefore, better management of improved services.
MSH has worked closely with the Health Metrics Network of the WHO to develop a comprehensive approach for enhancing the performance of health information systems and data by employing a practical, strategic planning process that can be carried out by national working groups.
