Creative Delivery Lead

Akcelo is an award-winning, independent brand experience agency founded in 2019. We have 200+ staff across offices in Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia. Our agency builds brands for the experience era with in house capabilities to drive unique experiences across the entire customer journey.

Our main North American office, located in beautiful Vancouver, BC is seeking a full-time Creative Delivery Lead to join our office. As a global agency with a rapidly expanding footprint, we are looking for a Creative Delivery Lead to play a crucial role in supporting our team to ensure the most effective resourcing and pipeline planning to upcoming resource needs and gaps.

Role Overview

As the Creative Delivery Lead, you will be the linchpin in ensuring that our creative projects run smoothly, with the right resourcing in place to deliver the best possible creative work. You will be responsible for optimally resourcing teams, overseeing project timelines alongside your account team and ensuring the team is set up for delivering creative excellence to our clients across the globe. Acting as a central hub between teams, stakeholders, and freelancers, this role drives operational efficiency and collaboration to meet client and business goals. This role is crucial to supporting our team from a people and culture perspective too, ensuring we’re building a strong culture that supports our team's growth and unlocking opportunities to make our office environment the best it can possibly be. This role blends creative delivery management with people and operations support, ensuring that both our talent and our work stay on track.

Key Responsibilities

Creative Project Delivery & Resourcing

• Project Scoping: Collaborate with the project and account team to ensure that all necessary resources are identified and project estimates are entered accurately.
• Project Timing and Planning: Support the team in reviewing project timelines, ensuring deadlines are clearly defined and attainable. Re-plan where required to accommodate changes in scope, resourcing, or client needs. Across the entire end to end delivery, you’ll also oversee the delivery of the end result, ensuring Producers are assigned, set up for success and are tracking to the media plan deadlines.
• Resource Management: Oversee all project resourcing needs, ensuring appropriate allocation of full-time employees and freelance talent. Monitor team bandwidth and maintain an up-to-date view of resource availability and project forecasts. Manage freelance talent sourcing and integration into project teams as needed.
• Burn Monitoring: Support the account team in managing retainer burn reporting and financial modelling, ensuring that project burn is tracked and stays within defined budgets.
• Producer Oversight: Assist with the booking of briefings, kick-offs, and reviews. Oversee the assignment of producers to project work, ensuring that the transition to production is smooth and timelines are met.
• Timeline & Budget Monitoring: Continuously monitor the health of all projects to ensure they remain on schedule and within budget. Proactively identify risks and issues, and escalate when necessary.

People & Culture Management

• Team Development: Support the development of team members by ensuring that skills are utilized effectively and appropriately. Assist in identifying growth opportunities and managing performance in quieter periods.
• Culture Stewardship: Own and nurture the agency’s culture, promoting a positive, inclusive, and creative work environment. Act as a point of contact for team members regarding workplace well-being, performance feedback, and career development.
• Freelancer Management: Assist with the sourcing and management of creative freelancers, ensuring that all freelance contracts and expectations align with the agency's quality standards and culture.
• Talent Mapping and Forecasting: Support the Managing Partner in assessing upcoming talent needs to ensure we are set up for success against the evolving needs of our clients
• Onboarding & Employee Engagement: Oversee employee onboarding processes, ensuring smooth integration of new hires into the agency culture and workflows. Coordinate employee vacation management and any other administrative people-related duties.
• Utilize and Unlock the Borderless Potential: Work with our teams in Sydney to ensure we’re effectively leveraging the borderless model, being a champion in the NA market for unlocking potential for resource management as well as growth opportunities for the local team to access other client work.

Operations & Process Improvement

• Operational Efficiency: Support in defining, improving, and streamlining agency operations and processes. Collaborate with senior leadership to implement best practices for efficient and productive ways of working across creative, strategy, and production teams. Develop and refine internal workflows, processes, and SLAs to optimise project execution and delivery. Track and report on billable vs. non-billable work weekly, identifying trends to drive performance improvements.
• Cross-Departmental Coordination: Liaise with other departments (e.g., Finance, HR, Production) to ensure alignment in operations and project delivery. Assist in building workflows that enhance communication and collaboration between departments.
• Risk Mitigation: Identify and mitigate risks related to project delivery, people management, and resource allocation, ensuring that potential issues are addressed before they become problems.

Key Requirements

• Experience: Minimum of 5 years of experience in creative delivery management, people operations, or project management within a top-tier creative or advertising agency.
• Project Management Expertise: Strong background in project management methodologies, including experience with project scoping, scheduling, budgeting, and resourcing. Familiarity with project management tools (e.g., Asana, Monday.com, Productive, Jira).
• Financial Acumen: Experience with retainer burn management, project financials, and resource modeling.
• Creative Mindset: Understanding of creative processes and workflows, with a focus on ensuring that the right creative talent is applied to the right projects at the right time.
• Problem-Solving: Ability to anticipate and address challenges proactively, offering solutions that balance both people and project needs.
• Communication: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to articulate complex concepts to both creative and non-creative teams and manage upwards with the executive global leadership team.
• Operational Understanding: Strong understanding of how to develop and implement efficient operational processes that drive productivity and collaboration across teams.