Professional Services Operations & Governance Partner

Sapiens is seeking a Centre of Excellence Associate to drive consistency, rigour, and quality in project management governance across Professional Services Operations. This is a senior, hands-on role for someone who will own and run project governance and enable delivery best practices. It combines governance & controls with delivery excellence & project management enablement across the large-scale, complex transformation programmes that define Sapiens’ SaaS-oriented delivery model.

If you thrive on building things that stick - frameworks, discipline, and a culture of excellence - and want your fingerprints on how a global business scales its delivery model, this is the ideal role for you.

Location/working model: London (Flexible Hybrid)

About the role:

Governance & Controls: Defining standard project lifecycle governance including scope control, change management, decision rights and escalation paths, project health KPIs (timelines, quality, velocity), reporting standards, and risk management. Establishing feedback loops & forums and owning accounts governance and support unifications.

Delivery Excellence & Learning: Enabling delivery flows, development cadences, data standards, and PM enablement. Defining milestone planning & acceptance criteria, development lifecycles, and systems replacements/enhancements. Maintaining lessons learned processes with implementation into customer, PM, delivery, and quality standards, and a centralized knowledge repository.

Sitting at the centre of PS Ops during Sapiens’ SaaS transition, this role offers broad portfolio exposure and the opportunity to build deep expertise in delivery governance, controls, continuous improvement, and decision frameworks, supporting the continued maturity of the PS Ops function and Sapiens’ ongoing growth.

Key Responsibilities:

Governance & Controls

• Define, own, and maintain standard project lifecycle governance including scope control, milestone entry/exit criteria, and change management across PS engagements
• Maintain and drive adoption of governance model, escalation paths, and decision rights across projects
• Own project health KPIs standards in partnership with Finance and PS delivery functions
• Create and own reporting standards and implement into new systems
• Establish feedback loops & forums for risks and lessons learned; act as point of reference for governance clarity
• Own accounts governance and support unifications across the portfolio
• Monitor adherence to governance and control standards; identify gaps, risks, or inconsistencies and drive corrective actions
• Govern large-scale, complex, multi-workstream transformation programmes, holding control points and escalation routes across concurrent customer engagements

Delivery Excellence & Learning

• Enable delivery flows, development cadences, data standards, and PM enablement, ensuring standards are practical and consistently applied
• Own milestone plan governance, acceptance criteria, and quality gates across delivery engagements
• Define and operate standardized lessons learned processes and implement into customer, PM, delivery, and quality standards
• Maintain a central knowledge repository and promote a learning culture beyond compliance
• Own development lifecycles and support systems replacements/enhancements
• Act as the enablement authority for delivery best practices, driving adoption across delivery teams rather than recommending from the sidelines

Collaboration

• Define tooling requirements and data standards with enterprise systems teams; continued ownership of enablement materials
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Delivery, PS Ops, Finance, and PMOs to embed standards into ways of working, tools, and operating cadences

Expected Experience:

• 7+ years owning and running project, programme, or portfolio governance within delivery operations or a PMO — not supporting or coordinating it, but accountable for the standards themselves — ideally in a professional services or customer-facing delivery environment.
• Direct experience governing large-scale, complex transformation programmes for external customers (multi-workstream, multi-year, high-value engagements), rather than small or mid-size implementations. Comfortable operating at the scale and complexity typical of enterprise software transformation.
• Experience at a large SaaS or born-in-the-cloud software company, delivering implementation projects for external customers (not internal/IT or R&D programmes). Strong familiarity with cloud-native, subscription-based commercial models is preferred.
• Proven track record defining and enforcing project scope control, change management standards, project health KPIs, and risk management across multiple concurrent customer engagements, driving consistency across workstreams and stakeholder groups — not just applying frameworks others have set.
• Hands-on ownership of milestone planning, acceptance criteria, and quality gates across the delivery lifecycle, with a clear point of view on stage gates, deliverables, and what “good” looks like at each control point.
• Deep command of governance frameworks, with the credibility and authority to hold delivery leads and account owners to escalation routes, decision rights, and control points across complex, multi-customer environments.
• Experience operating with and influencing senior delivery and account stakeholders — the seniority and confidence to enforce governance and drive adoption of best practice, not simply recommend it.
• Demonstrated ability to build lessons learned processes, knowledge repositories, and retrospectives, and turn delivery insight into actionable, embedded change.
• Proven ability to work cross-functionally with delivery teams, PS operations, Finance, and enablement functions, embedding standards into ways of working through influence and collaboration.