Manager, Project Management

Department Overview

The U.S. business is managing an increasingly interconnected portfolio of national initiatives, technology-enabled change, restaurant experience improvements, deployment programs, and growth priorities. Success requires more than moving work through a process. It requires disciplined choices, strong business cases, end-to-end planning, cross-functional alignment, and clear accountability from concept through deployment.  The Business Integration team sits at the intersection of strategy, governance, restaurant operations, and execution within U.S. National Operations. The team manages the GSET and RXR governance processes, partners across prioritization and technology governance, maintains visibility to the national initiative portfolio and calendar, and provides program management leadership for the highest-priority work. Our mandate is to balance business value with restaurant complexity, surface risk early, and enable the disciplined planning and operational readiness required for gold standard execution across the U.S. System.  This is an elevated Program Manager role. Team members may carry a primary governance or initiative-delivery assignment, but every Program Manager is expected to operate across both disciplines and flex with business priorities.

Duties

What You Will Own

• End-to-end initiative leadership. Guide complex, restaurant-impacting work from intake and concept through testing, approval, readiness, deployment, and stabilization.
• Governance integrity. Lead governance pathways through necessary requirements and ensure decisions are supported by the right evidence, stakeholder alignment, and operational inputs.
• Integrated plans and roadmaps. Build and maintain clear plans covering milestones, dependencies, resources, approvals, testing, training, communications, field engagement, deployment, and business outcomes.
• Cross-functional orchestration. Connect cross functional partners to produce aligned and executable solutions.
• Restaurant execution and complexity management. Evaluate sequencing, cumulative impact, execution risk, and calendar congestion; challenge teams to simplify solutions and enable successful execution in restaurants.
• Business value and decision quality. Pressure-test business cases, success measures, risks, assumptions, and tradeoffs so leaders can make timely, well-informed choices.
• Accountability and follow-through. Establish clear owners and deadlines, track commitments, resolve barriers, and escalate exceptions before they affect readiness or results.
• Executive communication. Create concise, decision-ready pre-reads, dashboards, recommendations, and status updates that clarify the ask, implications, risks, and next steps.
• Capability building. Coach initiative leads and cross-functional partners on governance expectations, project management practices, meeting discipline, and high-quality deliverables.
• Continuous improvement. Strengthen tools, processes, reporting, and ways of working using stakeholder feedback, lessons learned, and data.

How You Will Lead

• Operate as a strategic integrator, not simply a meeting facilitator or project tracker.
• Use enterprise judgment and an operations-first lens to connect initiative decisions to broader U.S. business priorities.
• Constructively challenge incomplete thinking, unclear ownership, unsupported timing, and unnecessary restaurant complexity.
• Influence without relying on authority; build trust while holding teams to high standards.
• Bring structure to ambiguity and move teams from discussion to decision and execution.
• Communicate directly, objectively, and with the right level of detail for working teams, Owner/Operators, and senior leaders.
• Flex between governance leadership and hands-on program management based on portfolio needs.
• Consistently demonstrate McDonald’s Values: Serve, Inclusion, Integrity, Community, and Family.

Success in This Role

• Initiatives enter governance with clear business value, required cross-functional alignment, and decision-ready materials.
• Plans make ownership, sequencing, dependencies, risks, and readiness transparent from approval through deployment.
• Leaders receive concise recommendations and early visibility to exceptions that require action.
• Restaurant impact and cumulative complexity are actively managed, not discovered late in the process.
• Initiative leads and partners become stronger through coaching, standards, and consistent ways of working.
• The portfolio advances with greater discipline, fewer avoidable execution gaps, and stronger accountability for outcomes.

Qualifications

Required Talent and Experience

• Strategic and enterprise thinking. Demonstrated ability to understand business strategy, connect interdependencies, evaluate tradeoffs, and translate priorities into executable plans.
• Program management mastery. Proven experience leading complex, multi-workstream initiatives across the full lifecycle using fit-for-purpose agile, waterfall, or hybrid methods.
• Governance and decision leadership. Experience designing, operating, or navigating stage-gate, portfolio, prioritization, or executive decision processes.
• Operational judgment. Ability to assess readiness, complexity, adoption risk, and frontline impact, then convert those insights into practical recommendations.
• Business acumen. Ability to assess business cases, expected value, restaurant impact, costs, tradeoffs, and success measures to inform prioritization and leadership decisions.
• Executive presence and communication. Exceptional written, verbal, facilitation, and storytelling skills; able to simplify complex issues and confidently lead senior-level discussions.
• Influence and accountability. Track record of aligning diverse stakeholders, resolving conflict, coaching peers, and driving commitments to closure without direct authority.
• Analytical discipline. Comfort using data, business cases, KPIs, risk analysis, and portfolio information to shape recommendations and measure outcomes.
• Adaptability and resilience. Ability to prioritize across competing demands, make progress amid ambiguity, and maintain quality in a fast-changing environment.
• Digital fluency. Advanced capability with Microsoft 365 and working knowledge of project, portfolio, workflow, and reporting platforms such as Smartsheet. Demonstrated ability to responsibly leverage AI-enabled tools to improve planning, analysis, communication, and productivity.
• Experience. Previous Project Management experience required. Bachelor’s degree in Business, Operations, Communications, Project Management, or a related field. MBA or relevant credentials such as PMP, PgMP, Agile, or change-management certification are preferred.

Positioning Note

• Assignments may vary based on portfolio demand, but the standard remains consistent: every team member must create clarity, lead across boundaries, enable gold standard restaurant execution, and drive disciplined delivery from ideation through deployment.

Compensation

Bonus Eligible: Yes

Long - Term Incentive: Yes

Benefits Eligible: Yes

Salary Range

The expected salary range for this role is $115,872.00 - $144,840.00 per year
 
The above represents the expected salary range for this job requisition. Ultimately, in determining your pay, we may also consider your experience, and other job-related factors.