Axial Risk

**Title: Axial & Risk Manager**
**Location: Mississauga**

**Function: Operations/Finance/IT**

**Full-Time, Permanent**

At AstraZeneca, we pride ourselves on crafting a collaborative culture that champions knowledge-sharing, ambitious thinking and innovation - ultimately providing employees with the opportunity to work across teams, functions and even the globe.

Recognizing the importance of individualized flexibility, our ways of working allow employees to balance personal and work commitments while ensuring we continue to create a strong culture of collaboration and teamwork by engaging face-to-face in our offices 3 days a week. Our head office and BlueSky Hub in downtown Toronto are purposely designed with collaboration in mind, providing space where teams can come together to strategize, brainstorm and connect on key projects.

As the Axial Risk & Assurance Manager you will be responsible for providing assurance that the risks for this major business and IT transformation programme are successfully identified, assessed and mitigated and that key project deliverables are properly executed as per the defined project methodology. You will have a relentless passion for delivery excellence with a strong risk and quality assurance focus. Working with the core programme team as well as local oragnizations, you will be accountable for engaging with senior stakeholders in the programme and the business to embed effective business risk management procedures and to provide risk and assurance inputs to support major decision points of the implementation.

Focus areas include stakeholder management across the Axial progamme, Business and vendor partners and liaising very closely with the Global Quality and the Enterprise Risk, Business Resilience & Financial Compliance organizations.

**Key Responsibilities**:

- Quality assurance and validation of key work product deliverables for the global programme
- Executing and coordinating assurance activities (deep dives, health checks, stage gate readiness reviews) including liaison with other internal and external assurance partners
- Delivering the Axial Risk Management and Assurance Plans for the programme
- Provide risk management guidance, templates, training for Axial programme team
- Fostering a culture of delivery excellence across the teams and driving continuous improvement
- Monitor the Risk and Issues log and ensure mitigation and escalation is effective
- Execute strategic programme risk assessments on a regular basis with key stakeholders
- Ensuring robust risk management and mitigation is in place across all programme workstreams
- Drive effective Business Coninuity and IT Disaster Recovery procedures for the global programme and local deployments
- Coordinate lessons learned reviews following deployments
- Validating the Axial programme governance, quality and controls methodologies are adhered to and advising on gaps and improvements
- Defining and implementing approaches for assuring the quality of deliverables ahead of key programme stage gates and major decision points
- Understanding the business process and IT risks change impacts associated with fit to standard and global process harmonisations
- Having a strong partnership with the senior stakeholders within the programme and the business is important to success in this role
- Anticipating early on the potential strategic risks and supporting the development of risk mitigation plans in line with risk appetite

**The Role**
- Responsible for the development and execution of quality assurance across the programme
- Responsible for embedding effective programme risk management procedures according AstraZeneca standards, including escalation protocols
- Support delivery excellence and continuous improvement across the Axial programme
- Engage, support and train the Risk Management Champions to better identify and assess the key risks faced in their respective areas
- Develop and monitor KPIs for risk and assurance and implement continuous improvement
- Support risk reporting to senior management
- Managing stakeholders across Business, IT, and vendor partners

**Interactions**:

- Manage interactions with the local organization
- Understand risks exposures and impacts from the business, IT and other relevant functions
- Manage the interactions with the Axial programme team
- Working closely with the programme team to support the broader programme schedule and objectives
- Knowledge and understanding of Governance, Risk and Control Frameworks, such as COSO, UK Corporate Governance Code, NIST etc.
- Experience of delivering risk based assurance activities
- Degree educated and experience in life sciences/pharmaceuticals industry
- Experience of complex projects and programmes
- Experience of Enterprise Risk Management, Business Resilience & Financial Compliance
- Understands the big picture and identifies key business risks and impacts
- Excellent communication skills and facilitation skills
- Fluent E