About Jarrard
Jarrard is a U.S. Top 10 strategic communications consulting firm focused exclusively on healthcare and the unique opportunities and challenges inherent in this sector. Founded in 2006, the firm has worked with more than 1,800 clients across 49 states and has led communications and political strategy on $100+ billion in announced M&A and partnership transactions. Jarrard partners with leaders across the spectrum of healthcare in high stakes moments of growth, innovation, change, and reputational/public affairs challenges. This array of specialized services is tailored to support leaders in the most impactful parts of the ecosystem that are essential in transforming U.S. healthcare for the better. In 2020, Jarrard Inc. joined Chartis, one of the nation’s leading healthcare advisory firms, and operates as a division under an independent brand.
Chartis is a comprehensive advisory firm dedicated to transforming healthcare. With an unparalleled depth of expertise in strategic, clinical, financial, and digital transformation Chartis helps leading academic medical centers, hospitals and health systems, integrated delivery networks, children's hospitals, physician enterprises, payers, and healthcare service organizations achieve transformative results.
Across both Jarrard and Chartis, we are fortunate to have extraordinarily talented people working in our firm – all brought together around our unifying mission “to improve healthcare”, a shared dedication to our core values, and the emphasis we place on creating an environment that enriches the experiences of our clients, our colleagues and our communities.
Jarrard has offices in Nashville, TN and as part of Chartis has offices in Chicago, IL, New York, NY, Washington D.C., and Boston, MA. Remote work is allowed.
For more information, visit jarrardinc.com and chartis.com.
Role Overview
We are seeking a Communications Portfolio Manager to support our deepest client relationships—our portfolios with our strongest partners--where we are serving multiple distinct projects and stakeholders at a single system simultaneously. The work requires a strong communications foundation and demonstrated project management experience. This role is essential in guiding internal teams to meet our clients’ needs in high-stakes moments of change, challenge and opportunity for some of the nation’s most prominent healthcare brands. While the majority of the work will focus on clients served by Jarrard, some clients that are jointly served by Jarrard and other areas of Chartis will also require hands-on oversight.
While this is a primarily client-facing role, this role offers opportunities to apply project management expertise to complex, firm-wide initiatives, helping to strengthen internal operations and scale best practices across teams.
Responsibilities

• Design and elevate internal project management processes and create project management tools, including intake and kick-off, routine project review and progress meetings, and reporting cadence
• Daily oversight of portfolio projects, including tracking milestones and deliverables, with an expectation to ensure project teams are on track to meet all client commitments. This role will focus on 3-5 clients at a time, depending on client portfolio complexity
• Conduct analyses of client engagements and identify opportunities to streamline workflows, enable coordination, allocate resources, and expand offerings. Think of this work as building high-level dashboards, developed with client leads to provide insights and aid decision process.
• Share and foster best practices in project management among our client teams. Importantly, project management will still be an expectation and important growth area for our client advisors (advisor-senior managing advisor role). This role will seek to support and strengthen those skills among our team.
  

The Work

• Create and maintain centralized project tracking tools that are easily accessible, transparent, and interactive
• Develop “at-a-glance” project summary resources for internal and external audiences
• Advise on kick-off activities, focusing on enablement of thoughtful timeline development and resource allocation
• Join client teams to project manage events, when asked by our clients.
• Work closely with client and team leads to ensure deliverables are on track and any risks are identified and mitigated early in the process
• Serve as quality assurance for key client deliverables, ensuring exceptional quality, accuracy, and alignment with client expectations.
• Provide technical leadership in the development and execution of project planning activities, including assistance with defining scope and documentation needs, setting an update/reporting cadence, tracking success measures, and facilitating lessons learned sessions
• Educate colleagues on best practices for project success and aiding firm leadership in developing learning opportunities related to project management
• Recommend opportunities to innovate and advance the breadth and quality of work through the lens of project management—ensuring best practices are shared
• Develop and maintain a repository of baseline project resources to aid in pitching and proposal development
  

Qualifications And Desired Skills

• 5-7 years in a comparable role with demonstrated, relevant experience
• Bachelor’s degree required
• Healthcare industry knowledge is required
• Client service experience is valuable but not required
• Demonstrated strength in writing is a plus, with the ability to contribute to development of high-quality, client-facing materials when needed
• Willing to take ownership of work and exhibit a high level of personal accountability
• Comfortable with ambiguity and creating order from chaos
• Someone who can write the rules and advocate for changing them, when needed
• Understands and can articulate the role communication plays in project success for the client and the firm
  

Salary range: $75,000-$80,000, plus may be eligible for an annual discretionary bonus. The salary range for this role considers the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including, but not limited to, skills, experience, training, licensure and certifications, practice area, and other business and organizational needs. In addition, Jarrard offers several benefits including medical, dental, vision, HSA, FSA, disability insurance, life insurance, 401(k) match, paid time off, wellness stipend, and additional voluntary benefits.
At Jarrard and Chartis, we pride ourselves on having a diverse workforce. We value and celebrate the uniqueness of individuals and the different perspectives they provide. We offer equal opportunity employment regardless of race, color, religion, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability status, age, marital status, or protected veteran status.