Director of Operations

Director of Operations

About Vantage Partners

Headquartered in Boston, Vantage Partners is a consulting and training firm that helps companies innovate more quickly, execute with greater discipline, and collaborate more effectively for sustained impact and growth. We serve clients worldwide, working with market leaders in sectors including biopharmaceuticals, healthcare, energy, financial services, technology, and manufacturing. Our founders have served on the faculties of Harvard University, the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and have published award-winning books and articles.

At Vantage, we are a team of intellectually fearless and relentlessly resourceful collaborators. Our Culture Code guides our interactions with each other and our clients. We take our work extremely seriously without ever taking ourselves too seriously. Whether we are gathering Thursday afternoons for a weekly snack time gathering offsite for offbeat events to celebrate our annual Fun Day, working together to better our communities as part of Vantage Volunteers, or building skills via regular in-office training sessions, we inspire and support each other to be innovative problem-solvers and stretch our thinking to produce unique insights.

Role Overview

Vantage Partners is hiring a Director of Operations to redesign and run the firm's corporate operating model. This leader will report to the firm's Management Committee and be responsible for the overall process for how work moves end to end through Vantage. This includes how the organization engages in opportunity tracking, project delivery, and closeout / reporting. In addition, the individual will ensure feedback loops are in place to ensure continuous improvement.

The goal is to achieve operational simplicity, consistent execution, and reliable visibility into capacity and economics.

This is not a coordination role. It is an accountable operator role with the authority and presence to redesign an operating model, implement it, and run it day to day.

Areas of Ownership

The Director of Operations is accountable for how the firm runs.

This includes ownership of:

• End-to-end operating model across consulting, training, and hybrid work
• Standard ways of working and adoption across teams
• Systems of record and operational data integrity
• Cross-functional operating rhythms and decision flow
• Evaluation, augmentation, and management of firm's overall technology stack to support the above

Key Responsibilities

Corporate Operating Model Design and Execution

• Partner with leadership to optimize the corporate operating model to support scale, consistency, and performance
• Translate strategy into clear operational structure, workflows, and decision rights
• Evolve existing model into a flexible operating plan that can handle ambiguity without devolving into ad hoc workarounds

Standard Ways of Working

• Define a small set of standard workflows for consulting, training, and hybrid engagements
• Establish what is standard, where flexibility is allowed, and how exceptions are handled
• Reduce duplicate trackers, shadow processes, and one-off workarounds through clear standards and follow-through resource monitoring, capacity, and delivery operations
• Optimize capacity and allocation management systems and processes across delivery resources and key roles
• Ensure staffing and resourcing processes are consistent, visible, and usable by teams
• Ensure scope, effort, and delivery commitments are tracked in disciplined, repeatable ways
• Establish a consistent closeout rhythm so lessons and actuals feed back into future scoping and pricing

Systems and IT partnership

• Help guide the organization to optimally integrate AI and related best practices in the running of the business
• Work closely with IT to define operational requirements for system selection, configuration, integration, access, and data standards
• Establish and maintain clear systems of record for operational decision making
• Reduce manual reconciliation across systems by clarifying inputs, handoffs, and automation opportunities

Data, Metrics, and Profitability Visibility

• Define the minimum set of operational metrics that leadership can trust for decisions
• Build reporting that supports capacity planning and basic profitability visibility by project, account, and offering, even if not perfect or real time
• Use metrics and KPIs to identify risks, measure progress, and drive continuous improvement, consistent with market expectations for operations leadership roles.

Exception Management

• Create a lightweight, explicit path for exceptions to standard processes
• Make exceptions visible, time-bound, and learnable so the system improves rather than frays

Decision Authority

The Director of Operations has the authority to:

Set and enforce operational standards and workflows

• Decide where flexibility is allowed and where it is not
• Approve or reject exceptions to standard processes
• Make day-to-day operational tradeoffs without needing partner-by-partner consensus
• Strategic…