Workday Foundations Project Manager at Primark, Reading/Remote, 6 Months initial, £Day Rate

Workday Foundations Project Manager

Duration: Initial 6 Months

Location: Dublin or Reading (Hybrid working)

Contract Type: Day Rate (Inside IR35)

Role summary

End to end project management of the Workday Foundations remediation project, spanning up to 30 workstreams delivered with our systems integration partner across 17 global markets. Foundations sits within a wider Workday programme and HR transformation portfolio, and its outputs will have direct inputs into other projects and programmes in a complex portfolio of change.

Key responsibilities

• Own the integrated Foundations plan across all in-scope workstreams, including critical path, sequencing and the dependency map into market and SKU implementation projects
• Manage the full workstream lifecycle from planning and discovery through design, recommendation and remediation delivery
• Act as the primary client-side counterpart to the systems integration partner's project management and workstream leads
• Hold the partner to contracted scope, acceptance criteria and quality standards, formally accepting or rejecting deliverables within contractual acceptance windows
• Own the scope register and operate change control, distinguishing genuine new scope from consequences of delivery failure
• Represent Foundations in programme governance, including delivery board, design authority and change control forums
• Maintain risk, issue, assumption, dependency and decision logs to a standard that withstands audit and external challenge
• Track partner effort against forecast and challenge burn that is inconsistent with delivery progress
• Manage stakeholders across 17 markets, including functional leads, platform owners and change, calibrating communication to audience
• Ensure knowledge transfers from the partner into the internal team rather than remaining with the vendor

Essential experience

• Workday programme or project management at enterprise scale, with genuine understanding of the Workday data model, security framework, business process framework and tenant management
• Remediation, stabilisation or post-implementation optimisation experience, as distinct from initial implementation only
• Client-side management of systems integration partners, including formal deliverable acceptance, quality challenge and contractual escalation
• Managing large, highly interdependent portfolios of parallel workstreams with contested resource and a fixed critical path
• Multi-market or multi-country delivery, including local statutory variation, works councils, language and time zone constraints
• Commercial literacy in vendor contracting, forecasting, burn analysis and change control
• Ability to construct and defend an evidence-based position under challenge from senior stakeholders and vendor leadership

Desirable experience

• Wider HR technology estate exposure, including ServiceNow, SmartRecruiters, UKG or equivalent workforce management platforms, and Workday Learning
• Workday country rollout methodology, and managing the interface between a core or foundations workstream and dependent deployment projects
• Retail, multi-site or high-volume frontline workforce environments
• Formal delivery qualification such as PMP, Agile Scrum, PRINCE2 Practitioner or MSP