Program Manager — Capital Portfolio

Overview

Join a leading organization dedicated to delivering essential services that power communities and drive progress. As a partner with Aquent, you’ll contribute to a mission-critical infrastructure that impacts countless lives daily, ensuring reliability and innovation in a vital industry. 

Our client oversees one of the largest high-voltage transmission capital portfolios in the region — approximately 35 projects totaling ~$13B in investment over the next 10 years. This is a newly established and fast-growing team that recently built out a governance framework and is now operationalizing it across the full portfolio. They need a sharp, organized Program Manager to support that effort at the portfolio level, keeping leadership and executives aligned with accurate, polished information.

Key responsibilities

• Support facilitation of portfolio governance processes including stage gate reviews, capital approval, KPI management, and risk management
  • Maintain gate submission checklists and readiness review materials
  • Implement and manage formal voting processes for gate meetings
  • Update gate requirements, deliverables, and governance playbook
• Develop and maintain documentation control standards — version control, naming conventions, storage locations, and retention policies
• Support Executive Steering Committee (SteerCo) meetings — prepare materials, facilitate discussions, and track follow-up actions
  • Create executive summaries and polished presentation materials
  • Draft and finalize meeting agendas in collaboration with portfolio leadership
  • Provide real-time support: slide management, timekeeping, facilitation
• Keep portfolio records current — update project list, validate scope, schedule, cost, and risk data across all active and pipeline projects
• Monitor and report on action item completion to leadership on a regular cadence
• Support ad hoc requests for additional meeting materials and executive reporting
• Bachelor’s degree – Required 
• 5+ years of program or project management experience – Must be in support of capital portfolios. Senior candidates (15–20+ years) are welcome if they are genuinely interested in this scope of work.
• Portfolio-level experience – Must have managed or supported a multi-project portfolio — not just individual projects. The role requires tracking a shifting 10-year pipeline, not just current active work.
• Executive-level PowerPoint / presentation creation – Heavy content creation for steering committee and leadership audiences. Must be polished, accurate, and fast.
• Strong professional writing and communication skills – Responsible for executive summaries, documentation standards, agendas, meeting minutes, and action logs distributed to senior stakeholders.
• Attention to detail / data accuracy – Information produced by this role goes directly to executives and external stakeholders. Errors have high visibility.
• Excel proficiency – Must be able to navigate and validate data from spreadsheets — pulling project status, cost, schedule, and risk data across a large portfolio.
• Governance / stage gate experience – Stage gate preferred; any structured governance framework (capital approval, tollgate, phase-gate) qualifies. Must understand the rigor behind formal review processes.
• Meeting facilitation and action tracking – Experience running cadenced executive or leadership meetings — managing agendas, capturing decisions, and following up on action items.
• Capital project industry background
• Utilities / high-voltage transmission is ideal. Oil & gas or large, complex capital ($1B+ projects, EPC contract structures) is acceptable.r.
• Utility or energy industry background – A plus for candidates from utilities or the Texas energy market. Not a barrier to entry if large capital experience is strong.