Program Manager - Data Governance

About the Role

The Information Governance Program Manager is a dedicated operational and strategic coordination role within the Information Governance program. Working in close partnership with the Information Governance Lead, this role serves as the central driver of execution, cross-functional alignment, and continuous improvement. The Program Manager ensures that governance intake, decision-making, stakeholder engagement, and documentation operate as a cohesive, transparent, and scalable system. This role is key to enabling Information Governance to function as a reliable decision engine across.

The primary activities include, but are not limited to:

Responsibilities

Primary Activities

The primary activities include, but are not limited to:

Program Planning, Execution & Governance Operations

• Co-lead day-to-day execution of the Information Governance program, ensuring consistency, follow-through, and clarity across all governance activities.
• Develop and maintain the program plan, including milestones, deliverables, timelines, and dependencies across active workstreams.
• Manage program cadence, including recurring meetings, review cycles, and decision checkpoints.
• Support and facilitate weekly meetings, including agenda development, issue triage, documentation, and action tracking.
• Ensure governance decisions are translated into operational actions with clear ownership and timelines.
• Monitor program health and escalate execution risks proactively to program leadership.

Intake, Portfolio Management & Tooling Enablement

• Manage the end-to-end intake pipeline, ensuring requests are received, triaged, prioritized, and advanced through defined workflow stages.
• Partner on the design and continuous improvement of the intake and review workflow, including quality review, impact assessment, prioritization, and endorsement steps.
• Maintain portfolio visibility across all active use cases, providing clear status on progress, blockers, and milestones.
• Track use case progression from submission through review, decision, implementation, and closure.
• Define functional requirements for governance tooling (e.g., Power Apps intake forms, dashboards, status tracking) and identify opportunities to improve scalability and usability.

Schedule, Dependency & Risk Management

• Build and maintain integrated schedules across program workstreams, identifying critical path items and interdependencies.
• Proactively identify and manage cross-functional dependencies, ensuring they are documented, communicated, and resolved before creating downstream delays.
• Coordinate sequencing across parallel efforts to prevent resource conflicts and timeline collisions.
• Establish and maintain a program-level risk and issue register, ensuring items are identified, assessed, owned, and tracked to resolution.
• Drive issue resolution through structured triage, escalation pathways, and follow-through on corrective actions.
• Coordinate across business, IT, architecture, data engineering, and platform teams to resolve blockers and maintain alignment.

Communication, Reporting & Stakeholder Engagement

• Co-develop and manage the program communication plan, ensuring consistent, timely, and audience-appropriate messaging.
• Coordinate regular communications including meeting summaries, action reminders, status updates, and decision readouts.
• Tailor messaging for different audiences (governance members, workstream leads, SMEs, and senior leadership) to articulate purpose, expectations, and required actions.
• Partner with program leadership to prepare executive-ready updates summarizing progress, risks, dependencies, and upcoming decisions.
• Continuously assess communication effectiveness and refine approaches to improve engagement.

Change Management Coordination

• Track and communicate the impact of governance decisions on affected teams, processes, and systems.
• Coordinate implementation activities to ensure governance outcomes are adopted, not merely documented.
• Support transition planning when governance decisions require changes to roles, workflows, or system configurations.

Workshop & Working Session Planning

• Support the planning and coordination of workshops and working sessions, including agenda design, sequencing, and facilitation logistics.
• Partner with subject-matter experts to integrate governance concepts into practical working sessions.
• Manage pre-reads, logistics, post-session summaries, and follow-up actions to ensure workshops produce actionable outcomes.

Knowledge Management & Documentation

• Oversee governance documentation, meeting artifacts, decision logs, and recordings to ensure materials are accessible, current, and auditable.
• Maintain alignment between governance discussions, documented decisions, and operational execution.
• Ensure institutional knowledge is preserved and transferable, reducing single-point-of-failure risk.

Qualifications

• Degree plus experience in pharmaceutical/biotech industry or information governance and program management, project management, or operational governance roles within a matrixed, cross-functional environment:
• Masters and Ph.D. candidates are preferred.

Required Skills

• Demonstrated experience managing complex programs with multiple parallel workstreams, interdependent timelines, and diverse stakeholder groups
• Strong facilitation skills with the ability to lead meetings, workshops, and working sessions that drive decisions and actionable outcomes
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to tailor messaging for technical, business, and executive audiences
• Experience with intake and workflow management processes, including design, documentation, and continuous improvement
• Proficiency in collaboration and tracking tools (e.g., Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Power Apps, Power BI, or equivalent)
• Strong organizational skills with meticulous attention to detail, follow-through, and documentation discipline
• Ability to operate independently, manage ambiguity, and maintain momentum across parallel workstreams without constant direction

Preferred Skills

• Experience in the pharmaceutical or life sciences industry, particularly within R&D, clinical, regulatory, or safety functions
• Familiarity with data governance concepts, including data domains, business glossaries, data stewardship, critical data elements, and data product frameworks
• Experience supporting or operating within governance bodies, steering committees, or cross-functional decision-making forums
• Exposure to enterprise data platforms (e.g., Veeva Vault, Databricks, SAP) and understanding of how governance decisions impact