Associate Director, Process Excellence and Performance Lead

Premier Research is looking for a Associate Director, Process Excellence and Performance Lead to join our Business Operations team.

You will help biotech, medtech, and specialty pharma companies transform life-changing ideas and breakthrough science into new medicines, devices, and diagnostics. What we do is profoundly connected to saving and improving lives, and we recognize our team members are the most valuable asset in delivering success.

• We are here to help you grow, to give you the skills and opportunities to excel at work with the flexibility and balance your life requires.

• Your ideas influence the way we work, and your voice matters here.

• As an essential part of our team, you help us deliver the medical innovation that patients are desperate for.

Join us and build your future here.

ROLE RESPONSIBILITIES: 

• Leads the design and evolution of SO&E methodologies, procedures, templates, and toolsets, ensuring standardization where appropriate and flexibility where context requires.

• Drives continuous improvement initiatives by identifying pain points, conducting root cause analyses, piloting solutions, and scaling improvements to reduce variation, cycle time, and rework.

• Oversees development of structured onboarding pathways and staged capability models for PAs/Sr PAs/PSs/Sr PSs and partners with Business Units for PM Onboarding.

• Establishes and maintains professional standards, competency frameworks, mentoring structures, and communities of practice.

• Establishes and advances organizational change maturity through structured governance, adoption metrics, leadership enablement, and reinforcement mechanisms.

• Ensures alignment between training content, operational practices, and SO&E standards to support sustained behaviour change and performance improvement.

• Develops and governs KPI frameworks, including portfolio health metrics, delivery performance indicators, adoption measures, and benefits realization tracking, working with Operational Analytics & Insights to ensure measures are meaningful, reliable, and actionable.
• Partners with Quality and Business Unit stakeholders to integrate risk management, compliance controls, and audit readiness into SO&E practices.

• Provides coaching and enablement to delivery teams on process excellence, performance management, and change methodologies.

• Partners with Business Unit and functional leaders to strengthen delivery predictability, visibility, and integrated ways of working.

• Partners with Operational Analytics & Insights to define business questions, performance measures, and reporting requirements; interprets and challenges analytical outputs; and uses insight to identify priorities, inform decisions, and evaluate whether improvements are delivering the intended outcomes. Contributes to effective governance of dashboard ownership, enhancement prioritization, and data quality, while technical analytics development and data architecture remain within the dedicated analytics capability.

• Accountable for the operational performance and delivery readiness of the Project Administrator (PA)/Senior Project Administrator (SPA)/Project Specialist (PS)/Senior Project Specialist (SPS) team, ensuring appropriate oversight, issue escalation, and performance management to maintain quality study execution across studies. Provides direct line management for a small number of PS/SPS colleagues where required to maintain appropriate spans of control across the wider management team.

• Balances billable utilization expectations with capability development and operational initiatives.

• Travel as required to key sites or stakeholders (up to approximately 5%).

REQUIREMENTS: 

Required

• Bachelor’s degree, or international equivalent from an accredited institution.  Business management, clinical, science, or health related field preferred.

• 10+ years of experience in process excellence/ SO&E methods, capability development,  or organizational change

• Experience operating within a clinical research or CRO environment

• Strong analytical, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills, with the ability to understand business data requirements, interpret and challenge analytical outputs, and translate insights into practical action.

• Experience influencing and aligning cross-functional stakeholders in a global organization.

• Proven track record delivering measurable improvements in cycle time, quality, operational consistency, or performance outcomes.

• Expertise in learning strategy, facilitation, coaching, and structured capability development models.

Preferred

• Certification in Lean, Six Sigma, Prosci, PMP, or equivalent methodology.

• Experience establishing KPI frameworks, defining business requirements for dashboards and performance reporting, and partnering effectively with data analytics specialists.
• Experience building competency frameworks, structured onboarding pathways, or professional standards models.