Business Program Management: Internship Opportunities at Microsoft

Required Qualifications

• Currently pursing a Bachelor's Degree in Business, Operations, Finance, or related field.
• Formal training in project and process management, financial accounting, business strategy and/or operations  
• Displays strong stakeholder and relationship management across senior leaders, partners and customers
• Ability to understand business metrics, customer and market trends. 
• Excellent verbal and written communication, analytical and presentation skills  
• You must be legally authorised to work in South Africa to be eligible for this role. (Legally authorised = has citizenship or has been granted a valid visa or work permit). 

Responsibilities

• As a Business Program Manager, you will be working with a variety of stakeholders from across the company to craft, analyze, orchestrate, and improve various programs and processes at the strategic level.  Performs non-technical project completion using an internal customer perspective, typically from initiation through delivery. Coordinate cross-functional teams through meetings and progress measurement activity which bring distinct, specific projects to completion both on time and within budget.
• Assists others in performing program landscape research and analysis (e.g., internal and/or external market, sales, delivery), forecasting, and examining business trends (e.g., customer feedback and expectations) to identify audience size and program scope, stay current, agile, and competitive.
• Helps improve operations of existing programs by helping apply industry methodology, define program issues, assess various scenarios, and select the optimal scenario to resolve issues.
• With oversight from others, contributes to the direction and strategy from leadership regarding business area of expertise in order to help execute plans that shift current priorities to new organizational initiatives and objectives, and influences others to change behavior accordingly. Learns to define vision and strategy for change, broad and specific impact, and the flow of communication to the organization.
• Learns how to define and track the success criteria and performance metrics (e.g., Objectives and Key Results [OKRs] and Key Performance Indicators [KPIs]), such as quality, adoption, usage, impact, and effectiveness for the program.
• Assists others working with cross-functional (e.g., organizational, product, business) stakeholders (e.g., Engineering) to design programs from initiation to delivery.