LF Studios
Director of Project Delivery
Blue Ash, Ohio•Full-time
About the Job
Why LF Studios
LF Studios is a leader in designing and building location-based experiences for attractions, museums, and immersive environments around the world. Every project brings a new creative or technical challenge. One month, it might be a life-sized animatronic character; the next, an immersive museum exhibit or a themed attraction experienced by millions of guests. Our teams bring together artists, engineers, sculptors, fabricators, programmers, designers, and storytellers, working alongside exceptional partners across the industry.
As we grow, so does the complexity of what we deliver. We’re seeking a Director of Project Delivery to lead our Project Managers and Company Planner, strengthen portfolio-level execution, and help us deliver complex, multidisciplinary work predictably and profitably. You’ll work with people who are excellent at what they do, bring your own expertise to the table, and see your work become something guests experience firsthand.
Primary responsibilities
Project Management Leadership:
- Lead, mentor, develop, and hold accountable the Project Management team; maintain clear expectations, workload balance, and performance standards.
- Hold PM’s accountable for maintaining reliable schedules, budget forecasts, risk and issue tracking, change records, and clear ownership of outstanding actions.
- Ensure PMs maintain disciplined client meetings, progress updates, submittals, approvals, internal coordination, and project closeout.
- Establish consistent project initiation, handoff, reporting, change management, risk escalation, closeout, and lessons-learned practices.
- Anticipate delivery risks and resolve them early, with accountable owners and dates.
Strategy Handoff and Delivery Coordination:
- Receive the strategy handoff package from Project Strategy at contract award, and ensure it translates into understood scope, budgets, milestones, and responsibilities.
- Resolve gaps or conflicting assumptions with the VP of Creative and Strategy and relevant department leaders before execution is affected.
- Coordinate with the Executive Creative Producer on special, complex, or high-profile projects so creative decisions and review gates are reflected in the delivery plan.
- Escalate decisions that affect project intent, contractual commitments, portfolio priorities, or organizational resources.
Monthly Billing and Finance Coordination:
- Coordinate with Finance to establish and meet monthly billable targets that support LF's cash flow needs.
- Align project progress, contractual billing milestones, client approvals, supporting documentation, and invoice readiness with the monthly billing plan.
- Maintain an updated billing forecast with Project Managers and Finance, identifying likely shortfalls and timing risks early.
- Ensure PMs provide timely billing information, approved changes, and project status needed for accurate financial forecasting. Finance retains responsibility for issuing invoices and cash forecasting.
Portfolio Planning and Capacity Forecasting:
- Oversee an integrated portfolio plan that balances current commitments and incoming projects against available capacity and delivery requirements.
- Maintain resource forecasts by discipline, identifying capacity gaps, underbooking, overbooking, dependencies, and bottlenecks early enough for action.
- Separate committed work from prospective work, and make timing, probability, and resource assumptions visible.
- Coordinate resource windows and project sequencing with Design and Production leadership; present options and consequences when priorities conflict.
- Oversee the use of labor tracking to report hours estimated versus hours spent by project and discipline, and feed the results back into future estimates.
Delivery Standards and Improvement:
- Establish consistent, practical planning and project management standards that produce dependable information across the portfolio.
- Use project results and lessons learned to improve forecast accuracy, handoffs, change management, and coordination.
- Provide leadership with a clear view of commitments, capacity, delivery risks, billing readiness, and decisions requiring action.
Leadership Relationships and Authority:
The VP of Creative and Strategy oversees project strategy for sales proposals and internal kickoff direction, as well as the Executive Creative Producer and the Director of Project Delivery. The Director owns planning and project management performance within that direction.
Planning establishes overall demand, capacity windows, dependencies, and proposed priorities. Design and Production managers retain responsibility for departmental execution and for scheduling individual employees and specific activities within agreed resource windows.
On projects with an Executive Creative Producer, the Producer guides the end product and creative decisions. The assigned PM maintains the integrated scope, budget, schedule, communications, and change record. The Director ensures these responsibilities remain coordinated and clear.
The Director may set planning and PM standards, assign PM and Coordinator coverage, require corrective plans, and resolve routine coordination issues within approved commitments. Approval of material changes to project strategy, staffing, spending, or contractual commitments rests with the authority established by LF, not with the Director alone.