Strategic Transformation PMO Specialist

Teso Life Inc.; New York (NY); On-site; USD 72,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

TESO Group in New York seeks a strategic PMO professional to support the CSO in establishing and running the company-wide project management mechanism. You will translate corporate strategies into clear project plans, owners, milestones, risks, and value targets while tracking execution and outcomes.

The role emphasizes project intake, portfolio maintenance, integrated planning, risk alerts, escalation, and governance improvements.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or above in a related field.
• End-to-end project management experience preferred.
• Strong communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Ability to establish governance, milestones, and value realization reviews.
• Experience with PMO tooling and project documentation.

Responsibilities

• Receive strategic, reform, system, new-business, and cross-functional projects from the CSO or CEO.
• Define business problem, value, scope, owner, budget, metrics, and timelines.
• Prioritize projects based on value, urgency, resources, risk, and return.
• Maintain the corporate strategic project portfolio and identify dependencies and resource conflicts.
• Coordinate initiation, planning, acceptance criteria, and change management across projects.
• Organize kickoff meetings, assign owners, due dates, and acceptance criteria.
• Track progress with weekly follow-ups and monthly reviews; escalate blockers.

Skills

Strategic planning

Cross-functional coordination

Risk management

Meeting management

Communication

Education

Bachelor’s degree or above

Tools

Asana

Monday

Smartsheet

Jira

Microsoft Project

Excel

PowerPoint

Job description

About TESO Group
Founded in 2017 in New York, TESO Group is an Asian-inspired lifestyle retail company bringing premium Asian products and culture to the U.S. market. With brands including TESO LIFE, TESO X, and TESO Mini, we offer a curated mix of beauty, snacks, home goods, and trendy collectibles—delivering quality, value, and a unique shopping experience.

Position Overview

This position is responsible for assisting the CSO in establishing, operating, and maintaining the company-level strategic project management mechanism; translating approved corporate strategies, major reforms, and transformation initiatives into clear project plans, owners, milestones, risks, acceptance criteria, and value targets; and continuously tracking project execution, business acceptance, and results reviews.

The position focuses on strategic project intake, initiation checks, portfolio maintenance, integrated planning, progress tracking, risk alerts, cross-functional coordination, meeting action-item management, project acceptance coordination, and 30/60/90-day value realization reviews. It promptly identifies unclear accountability, missed milestones, resource conflicts, prolonged delays, and similar issues, and escalates them to the CSO or relevant owners in accordance with the escalation mechanism.

This position is responsible for executing and maintaining PMO governance processes and recommending continuous improvements. It does not replace business functions in making professional judgments or owning project business results. Project business owners are accountable for execution and business outcomes; this position is accountable for the accuracy of project information, timely follow-up, risk warning and escalation, action-item closure, and completeness of project documentation.

Job Responsibilities

• Receive strategic, reform, system, new-business, and key cross-functional projects confirmed by the CSO or CEO and include them in the centralized strategic project register.
• Verify that each project clearly defines the business problem, strategic value, scope, ultimate accountable owner, participating departments, budget, key metrics, timeline, and acceptance requirements; return incomplete submissions for supplementation.
• Assist the CSO in prioritizing projects based on strategic value, urgency, resource requirements, project risk, and expected return.
• Maintain the corporate strategic project portfolio; identify duplicate initiatives, resource conflicts, critical dependencies, and excessive team workload, and issue timely warnings or escalations.
• Retain approval rationale and complete change records for projects that are paused, cancelled, delayed, or have scope changes.
• Project Initiation, Planning & Accountability Mechanism
• Coordinate completion of the Strategic Project Charter by project owners, clearly defining objectives, baseline, target, business value, budget, deliverables, and success criteria.
• Assist in establishing the work breakdown, milestone plan, responsibility matrix, and communication mechanism, clearly identifying the owner, due date, and approver/acceptance owner for each task.
• Identify system, data, staffing, vendor, budget, and cross-functional dependencies across projects and incorporate them into the master plan.
• Organize project kick‑off meetings to ensure team members understand objectives, responsibilities, milestones, reporting methods, escalation mechanisms, and acceptance criteria.
• When major changes occur to scope, budget, objectives, or delivery timing, coordinate reassessment of the impact and submit changes for approval according to delegated authority.
• Continuously compare planned versus actual progress through weekly project follow‑ups, monthly transformation reviews, and project dashboards.
• Establish Red/Amber/Green (RAG) project status standards and promptly identify delays, insufficient resources, unclear accountability, data anomalies, and cross‑functional blockers.
• Record each risk or issue and assess its impact; drive responsible owners to define corrective actions, completion dates, and the next review point.
• Promptly alert the CSO and relevant owners to matters expected to affect key milestones, budget, go-live timing, or strategic objectives.
• Issues unresolved beyond the agreed deadline, showing no substantive progress for two consecutive reviews, or affecting major company objectives must be escalated to the CSO or CEO for decision.
• PMO must proactively verify actual project status and supporting evidence and may not stop follow‑up because a project owner fails to report proactively.
• Meeting, Decision & Action‑Item Closure
• Organize strategic project meetings, transformation reviews, and special decision meetings, and prepare project status, issues, data, and decision items in advance.
• Clearly document conclusions, owners, completion dates, and acceptance requirements during meetings; avoid vague wording such as “continue to follow up” or “complete as soon as possible.”
• Promptly create an action‑item log after meetings and send it to responsible owners for confirmation.
• Continuously track all due action items and obtain the cause, corrective plan, and newly approved completion date for overdue items.
• Maintain decision records documenting decision background, options, approved conclusion, accountable owner, and subsequent execution results.
• The number of meetings is not considered a work outcome; completion of meeting actions and closure of issues are the project‑management results.
• Coordinate Operations, Merchandising, Finance, HR, CAO, IT, Supply Chain, Marketing, Expansion, and other functions to resolve accountability and resource conflicts. Issues that cannot be resolved at the project level must be escalated promptly to the CSO or relevant management for decision.
• Drive each department to identify a business owner and project point of contact; “joint departmental responsibility” may not replace a single accountable owner.
• For cross‑functional deliverables, clearly define the provider, recipient, delivery standard, delivery date, and acceptance requirements.
• For matters requiring management decisions, summarize the issue background, business impact, available options, recommended option, and latest required decision date.
• Do not replace business owners in making professional decisions, and do not allow projects to remain stalled for extended periods because departments disagree.
• Project Acceptance & Value Realization Management
• At project initiation, define separate standards for deliverable acceptance and value realization, and manage “project delivery completion rate” and “project value realization rate” separately.
• After go‑live or solution release, coordinate acceptance by actual user departments to confirm whether functionality, processes, data, training, and usage conditions meet requirements.
• Conduct 30/60/90‑day post‑launch reviews against baseline and target values to assess adoption, efficiency, cost, revenue, risk, or other expected outcomes.
• Projects that meet go‑live requirements but have not achieved expected value must be marked “Live - Value Not Yet Realized” and may not be closed directly.
• For projects that do not meet targets, coordinate root‑cause analysis and drive the project owner to propose optimization, continued observation, reduction, pause, or exit options; summarize the options and impacts and submit them to the CSO or relevant approver for decision.
• A project may be formally closed only after business acceptance, action‑item closure, documentation archiving, and value realization review are complete.
• Corporate Policy Governance Process Support
• Maintain the Policy Master Register in accordance with company Policy Governance requirements, recording the Policy Owner, scope of application, version, effective date, approval status, and review date.
• Receive requests from departments to create, revise, or retire policies; verify that submission materials and required reviews are complete and return incomplete requests for supplementation.
• Coordinate the Policy Owner and relevant professional functions through the Review and Approval process and track the request until the appropriate approver completes approval.
• For approved policies, manage version registration, publication coordination, notification, archiving, and retirement of superseded versions, and track required training, acknowledgement, or related SOP updates.
• Periodically identify policies due for review, version exceptions, and outstanding items; drive Policy Owners to resolve them and elevate major or long‑unresolved matters to the CSO.
• Key Transformation Project Support & Responsibility Boundaries
• Provide PMO tracking for annual organizational‑change projects, continuously monitoring milestones, risks, action items, and implementation results. Organizational‑change design and people implementation are owned by the CSO, HR, and relevant business owners according to their responsibilities.
• Provide PMO governance support for ERP, WMS, POS, BI, CRM, internally developed systems, and other key system projects, tracking plans, milestones, risks, cross‑functional dependencies, and value realization. Technical architecture, information security, development/implementation, and system operations are owned by IT.
• Provide PMO tracking support for strategic projects involving corporate legal and compliance remediation, tracking plans, milestones, risks, and action items. Legal judgment, corporate compliance, and board governance are owned by the CAO.
• Provide PMO governance support for store‑operations reform projects, tracking plans, key milestones, risks, and results reviews. Sales, profit, labor, inventory, and store‑management results are owned by the COO and Operations organization.
• Provide PMO governance support for new‑business pilots, tracking project plans, milestones, risks, acceptance, and value realization reviews. The business owner is accountable for execution, operating results, and pilot business judgments.
• Assist the CSO in establishing and continuously improving standard templates for project initiation, planning, status updates, risk management, changes, acceptance, review, and closure.
• Standardize project status, milestones, completion rates, risk levels, and closure criteria to prevent inconsistent definitions across projects.
• Fully archive project initiation, approval, plans, meetings, decisions, acceptance, reviews, and closure documentation.
• Periodically summarize and analyze project delays, rework, resource conflicts, and unrealized value; identify common causes and develop PMO governance improvement recommendations for CSO review.
• Based on project volume and work complexity, recommend PMO staffing, tools, and project‑management system configuration for CSO evaluation.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s degree or above; Project Management, Business Administration, Information Systems, Operations Management, Finance, or a related field preferred.
• Professional Experience: 2–4 years of experience in project management, PMO, enterprise transformation, process management, or cross‑functional project coordination.
• Project Experience: End-to-end experience with organizational change, system implementation, process optimization, or new‑business projects from initiation through acceptance and closure; chain retail or multi‑site enterprise experience preferred. Practical participation in projects from initiation and planning through tracking, acceptance, or review is preferred.
• Knowledge & Skills: Project portfolio management, project planning and milestones, RACI, risk and issue management, business processes, data analysis, meeting and decision management, project acceptance, and value realization review. Basic capability in process governance, document management, and version control.
• Tools: Proficient in Asana, Monday, Smartsheet, Jira, Microsoft Project, Excel, PowerPoint, or similar project‑management tools.
• Core Competencies: Planning, persistent follow‑up, integrity and adherence to standards, cross‑functional influence, structured communication, risk awareness, problem solving, results orientation, and strong ability to perform under pressure.
• Language: Strong written and verbal communication skills in both English and Chinese.

Compensation

• $72,000-$80,000 per year
• Quarterly Performance Bonus: This position is eligible for a quarterly performance-based bonus, subject to the eligibility requirements, performance criteria, and terms of the Company’s bonus program.
• 401(k) & 401(k) matching - subject to the eligibility requirements