General Position Summary

The Program Performance & Quality (PaQ) Manager will provide technical guidance and support for program management and coordination across the country programs’ portfolio of multiple grants, while supervising Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) team member; Technical Advisors; grants officer and coordinating with the Community Accountability Reporting Mechanism (CARM) function.

S/he will have oversight of the Mercy Corps Program Management Minimum Standards (PM@MC) function by helping Program Managers to assess program performance against minimum standards and to provide implementation support as necessary, in line with both PM@MC standards and donor requirements. S/he will have oversight of the development of effective program filing and archiving systems, standardization and capacity building of program teams on the process for program deliverable quality assurance checks and making cross-department processes more efficient (as required). The PaQ Manager will lead and support on new business development and specifically assist in securing new programs by ensuring that learning and strong process management feeds into proposal development. The PaQ Manager is highly motivated, s/he is an effective communicator, self-driven and able to move forward complex projects with limited daily support and direction; s/he is able to work remotely with internal and external stakeholders to achieve common objectives. 

 Essential Job Responsibilities

STRATEGY & Business Development

• Lead and support new Business Development including needs assessments and feasibility studies.
• Provide strategic guidance and vision on Mercy Corps Program Management (PM@MC) approaches to Afghanistan’s program team.
• In coordination with management, set direction by prioritizing and organizing actions & resources to achieve objectives and contribute to country-wide strategy development. This includes supporting development of any sector-specific strategies, and assigning technical advisors as needed to meet objectives.
• Support cross-program learning, including operation of sector-specific Technical Working Groups.
• Work with Afghanistan’s MEL Manager to ensure that Afghanistan has well-structured program and portfolio learning processes (Including program and country learning plans or agendas, and appropriate resourcing) in place, and that these events utilize program and context data to drive continuous improvement.

PROGRAM QUALITY MANAGEMENT

• Working with the Program Management Reporting system (PMR) and other country-specific tools, assess program adherence to PM@MC minimum standards and provide support as needed to address gaps or areas of improvement.
• Provide technical oversight to Program Managers and Grants Officers to develop program filing and archiving systems and to ensure programs’ documentation is filed, in compliance with PM@MC, and donors’ regulations and good practice.
• Provide technical guidance to Program Managers and Grants Officers to set up effective internal and external program-coordination structures and review meetings, and to use on time-on scope-on budget and other quality measures to assess progress and inform continuous improvement.
• Work with Programs to refine processes for program deliverable quality assurance checks for commonly recurring program activity areas, including SOP development, checklist development, monitoring and spot check procedures.

• Provide direct program start-up and planning support to strategically important programs, as directed by the Director of Programs.
• Supervise and coordinate the inputs of technical advisors throughout program life cycle. This includes supporting the technical advisors in ensuring technical quality in implementation, planning and deliverables and in quality assurance processes.
• Together with the technical advisors develop processes and practices to consistently and meaningfully contribute to program technical quality and inclusion.
• Work closely with the CARM Manager (Community Response Mechanism) to ensure community feedback and lessons leart are integrated into future design.
• Maintain effective communications with regional and headquarters PaQ and Technical Support Unit teammates and program teams on program quality and grants tracking issues, and information requests from internal/external sources.

monitoring, evaluation and learning

• Supervise the MEL Manager, ensuring strong performance as well as strong coordination between portfolio-level MEL and program-level team members. 
• Support the MEL Manager in planning MEL events.
• Support the MEL Manager in ensuring the implementation of, and if possible going beyond, MEL minimum standards within programs. Ensure that Program Managers/ Directors are supporting program-level MEL team members to use common processes and prioritize strong MEL and data-driven decision-making, working with portfolio-level MEL as an integrated team.
• Work with the MEL Manager to standardize and ensure the effectiveness of program and portfolio-level learning and adaptive management events and processes.
• Support the MEL Manager in integrating MEL technologies into program data lifecycle management and building team member skills to use these technologies.

CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT AND COORDINATION

• Liaise with the Programs, Finance and Operations teams, and when necessary external partners, to ensure that proposals and proposal budgets integrate program quality and MEL needs and considerations.
• Build capacity of program teams with information, tools and resources to improve performance and reach objectives, and review programmatic tools (implementation and follow-up of QA/QC processes, development and/or revision of SOPs, etc.).
• Organize workshops, trainings (for Mercy Corps Afghanistan’s staff and partners) as needed to answer the programs’ needs (including the Program Standards Learning Pathway and specifically PM@MC trainings)

REPRESENTATION AND COMMUNICATION

• Provide support to the Programs to represent Mercy Corps programs with national and international counterparts, donors, partners and participate in coordination forums and clusters as required.   
• Provide support to Program teams in the organization of donors’ visits.
• Support the development of strategic, cross-program communication materials, such as sector profiles, impact reports, program briefings, leadership and positioning pieces, key messages, talking points, and other relevant pieces.

SECURITY

• Ensure compliance with security procedures and policies as determined by country leadership.

ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING 

• As part of our commitment to organizational learning and in support of our understanding that learning organizations are more effective, efficient and relevant to the communities they serve, we expect all team members to commit 5% of their time to learning activities that benefit Mercy Corps as well as themselves.

ACCOUNTABILITY TO BENEFICIARIES

• Mercy Corps team members are expected to support all efforts toward accountability, specifically
  to our beneficiaries and to international standards guiding international relief and development work, while actively engaging beneficiary communities as equal partners in the design, monitoring and evaluation of our field projects.

Supervisory Responsibility

MEL Manager

Grants officer

CASH Advisor

WASH Advisor

Gender and Protection Advisor