At Sun Life, we value diversity, experience, and unique perspectives. We encourage, empower, and challenge our colleagues to be their best selves, working alongside dynamic experts eager to share their knowledge. Our leaders inspire growth, helping employees reach their full potential.
The Director, Project & Portfolio Management (P&PM) leads the continuous improvement of portfolio governance and monitoring across Sun Life Canada’s initiative portfolio. This ensures investments are governed consistently and decisions are supported by clear, decision-ready insights. The role champions the evolution of P&PM practices by right-sizing governance, strengthening accountability, and aligning investment decisions with value delivery.
Key Responsibilities
This role involves setting the direction and continuously evolving Canada-wide portfolio governance, including standards, thresholds, escalation criteria, and monitoring across Business Units and Enablement Functions. You will lead the end-to-end operating rhythm for executive oversight forums, managing agendas, materials, decision points, outcome tracking, and follow-through. Directing quarterly portfolio reporting and health monitoring, encompassing spend, forecast, benefits confidence, status, key risks, and re-approval triggers, is crucial to ensure insights drive timely intervention.
You will translate complex portfolio information into concise, decision-oriented insights to enable trade-offs, prioritisation, and escalation of material risks or changes. Governance oversight of business casing and investment changes will ensure minimum requirements are met and trade-offs are explicit. The Director also enables strategic and business planning by coordinating initiative inputs and ensuring portfolio views are complete, consistent, and leadership-ready, while overseeing governance controls that support compliance indicators and Canada attestations.
You will serve as a central point of coordination across Finance, portfolio leads, initiative owners, and delivery partners to align expectations and reduce ambiguity, acting as a trusted thought partner to senior leaders. Navigating evolving priorities and competing perspectives with confidence and credibility, grounding recommendations in insight and logic, is key. This role drives alignment across stakeholders on governance expectations, decision points, and accountability for portfolio actions, while strengthening business case quality and consistency by defining minimum requirements and supporting due diligence. You will partner with value realisation stakeholders to clarify outcomes, measurement approaches, and benefits confidence from business case through delivery and post-implementation, identifying and recommending improvements to governance, reporting, and tooling.
What You'll Bring
We are looking for someone with 8–12+ years of progressive experience in Finance, Strategy, Transformation, and/or Consulting, including experience managing large initiatives. You should demonstrate the ability to translate complex and imperfect information into clear, decision-ready insights and executive-ready materials, coupled with strong governance design and operating discipline across multiple stakeholder groups. Strong financial and business case capability, including cost/benefit and investment governance expectations across the initiative lifecycle, is essential.
Proven cross-functional leadership and influence are required, enabling you to align stakeholders with competing priorities and drive follow-through without relying solely on formal authority. People leadership experience, including coaching and developing team members and maintaining quality control over critical governance outputs, is also necessary. Candidates must possess strong interpersonal and communication skills, with the ability to build credibility with senior leaders, and be proficient in MS Office, particularly advanced Excel and PowerPoint, with comfort working with portfolio data and reporting tooling.
A professional designation such as CPA or CFA is considered an asset. Experience leading and managing change within a complex organisation, along with project or programme management experience, is preferred. We value creativity and resilience in ambiguous, fast-changing environments.
For positions in Quebec, bilingualism in French and English, both oral and written, is required as the role includes managing both French and English-speaking staff and providing daily support to the team.
Our Culture & Work Environment
Diversity and inclusion are core values at Sun Life. We believe a diverse workforce with wide perspectives and creative ideas benefits our clients, the communities where we operate, and all our colleagues. We welcome applications from qualified individuals from all backgrounds.
Sun Life is proud to be a hybrid organisation, offering employees the choice and flexibility to work from both the office and virtually, based on business needs, client requirements, and individual preferences. Various work options are available and can be discussed throughout the selection process.
