Marketing Transformation Programme Manager

Department: Project Services & Change

Location: London with hybrid working

Position type: 6-month contract (umbrella – inside IR35); ASAP start date (preferably April 2026)

What The Hiring Manager Says:

“This is a very exciting opportunity to join our agile, fast-paced, and versatile team of project and programme professionals, driving our Marketing Ambition programme. You’ll lead the delivery of multiple transformation initiatives, connect people and teams across the organisation, and enable effective collaboration with external partners. You will play a pivotal role in orchestrating execution across a number of cross-organisational strategic activities, creating meaningful and tangible impact to the GSMA, its members and the wider mobile ecosystem.”

About The Team:

The Project Services & Change Team in the GSMA provides project and programme management capabilities to deliver change initiatives across the mobile industry. Working in close partnership with subject matter experts within the GSMA and from across the mobile industry, the Project Services team manages a wide range of projects and programmes in all areas of the organisation, including Technology, Product Development, Marketing and Events, as well as internal facing projects in IT, Finance and HR. As part of the project delivery, the Project Services team also provides change expertise to GSMA projects to guide the implementation of change initiatives within the organisation.

About The Role:

With an increasing number of platforms, reduced attention spans, and in an increasingly fractured world, Marketing initiated a transformation to ensure future readiness and resilience with best-in-class marketing capabilities, harmonised ways of working, and the ability to scale. As the Marketing Transformation Programme Manager, you will oversee and manage strategic business initiatives and accelerate collaboration across internal teams and external partners, ensuring the CMO delivers her ambition to become a globally influential, data-driven growth engine that elevates the mobile industry’s voice to shape the future of connectivity and amplify commercial and societal impact. You will coordinate delivery across multiple GSMA departments and external partners, maintaining alignment, visibility, and control across the programme. This role requires strong stakeholder leadership, exceptional communication skills, and the ability to remove barriers to deliver impactful outcomes.

Key Responsibilities:

• Programme Planning and Delivery Management
• Develop integrated programme plans including clear objectives, outcomes, milestones and deliverables, ensuring alignment with strategic objectives.
• Support the definition of the structure and approach for the delivery of the Business Transformation programme, with consideration for dependencies and constraints.
• Proactively identify, assess, and manage risks, challenges, and dependencies across the programme, and implement mitigating solutions to maintain delivery momentum and ensure that potential issues are addressed promptly.
• Maintain and track integrated programme plans covering multiple workstreams.
• Ensure the delivery of process, technology, data, and operating model changes is to the appropriate level of quality, on time and within budget, in accordance with the programme plan.
• Ensure allocation of resources and skills within the programme’s individual projects to meet programme priorities.
• Implement structured change control processes to manage scope and maintain programme integrity.

Governance and Communication:

• Establish and maintain programme governance frameworks, including steering committees and decision boards.
• Design communication plans that keep stakeholders informed and engaged throughout the programme, ensuring that messages are consistent, transparent, and tailored to a variety of multi-level stakeholders.
• Deliver clear and consistent strategic insights and updates on progress, risks and impacts to diverse audiences, including executives, business and technical teams.
• Prepare, plan and lead internal and external stakeholder meetings, ensuring decisions and actions are documented and followed up.
• Prepare high-quality presentations, reports, and briefing materials that influence decision-making.
• Collaborate closely with the Change Manager to ensure the Programme Communication plan is integrated and the messages aligned with the overarching Stakeholder Engagement and Communication Plan.

Stakeholder Engagement and Management:

• Build strong relationships and work closely with executive sponsors, Marketing Leadership and Senior Management teams, GSMA business leads, technical experts, and external partners to ensure aligned delivery.
• Facilitate collaboration and communication between Marketing teams within the Business Transformation Programme and other GSMA departments.

Benefits Realisation and Performance Tracking:

• Define outcome owners from relevant Marketing and other business areas for all transformation outcomes, clarifying their decision-making authority, and ensuring they jointly own the results with technology, delivery teams, and other relevant GSMA business teams.
• Ensure that accountable leaders are identified, empowered, and responsible for delivering measurable value.
• Define business benefits with Transformation Outcomes owners across financial, operational, customer, and cultural dimensions, and validate with executive sponsors.
• Ensure programme benefits are tracked and managed as per the programme sponsor requirement.
• Ensure all change is instrumented and tracks towards the benefits - such that we know how we are doing in near-real time and can adjust as required.

About You:

This is a hands-on role with successful candidates required to be self-motivated and able to work effectively, with limited supervision. You have significant experience delivering large scale business or digital transformation programmes (desirable experience in marketing, association or events). You are an experienced Programme Manager who thrives when leading multi-stakeholder programs in complex political environments. You are comfortable managing complexity across teams, aligning delivery frameworks, and enabling senior stakeholders to make informed decisions. You have strong interpersonal and communication skills with the ability to build trust, collaboration and alignment. You are a self-starter with high accountability and problem-solving mindset. Demonstrated ability to navigate ambiguity, balance competing strategic priorities and find solutions to unblock delivery, keep momentum and deliver results under pressure. You have experience managing external vendors and holding them accountable for deliverables. You have experience managing budgets and cross-functional delivery teams. You are comfortable with agile, iterative delivery approaches. Strong analytical mindset with deep understanding of business performance metrics frameworks. You have the ability to create a sense of community amongst the projects and project teams. You have experience of working in an international and cross-cultural environment. You should be comfortable engaging with technology teams and understanding how to translate complex information into clear delivery plans.

About Your Skills:

• Communication
• Delivery
• Leadership
• Teamwork
• Stakeholder Management

Contract type: Short term Contractor

Worker type: Contingent Worker

What We Offer:

Working at the GSMA offers you unparalleled access to the mobile industry. We offer a chance to truly shape the direction of mobile, whatever your role. By joining the GSMA, you will be exposed to a fast-paced rapidly evolving environment, working on global solutions, genuinely fascinating and industry-changing projects and a stimulating and dynamic environment designed to enable you to flourish. In addition to architect-designed offices and competitive compensation, our benefits include fantastic learning & development opportunities, generous holiday allowances, four additional days off for professional development and many others.

Being You at the GSMA:

We care deeply about diversity, equity and inclusivity and aspire to be the best at it. Your well-being and work/life balance is important, so flexi-time and remote working is available to all staff. We’re keen to ensure everyone is equal, represented and connected so we particularly encourage applications from all demographics. The success of the GSMA year on year will continue to be contributed by people from all walks of life.

GSMA Values:

Our values not only drive our culture – they shape how we work and interact inside and outside our global organisation.

• Passionately Driven: We approach everything we do with unparalleled capability, tenacity and commitment, knowing that the challenging scale, pace and complexity of our work is what leads to its world-changing impact.
• Insightful Leaders: We continually develop and engage our expertise, insight and creativity so that we’re always ready to respond to the changing landscape with authority, agility and nuance.
• Stronger Together: We lean on each other so the industry can lean on us, embracing our diversity by actively seeking out perspectives and skill sets beyond our own, fuelling each other’s successes and constantly asking how we can help.

Underpinning our values is our collective mindset to show up purposefully as good human beings every day, in every situation. When we’re at our best – we are collaborative, considerate and compassionate to others, and we create a safe space for one another to thrive, assuming positive intent in our colleagues. And if we aren’t at our best and the pressure is on – we feel free to be ourselves but still remain curious, lean into the tough stuff and we are always respectful to others and accountable for the part we play.