Marketing Vendor & Spend Governance Manager

Thomson Reuters is seeking a contract Marketing Vendor & Spend Governance Manager to establish vendor, agency, and contractor governance across Marketing & Communications. The role will develop preferred-vendor and intake processes, spend controls and reporting, and transition the framework to the permanent StratOps team.

Responsibilities:

• Leads a current-state assessment early in the engagement, inventorying vendors, agencies, contractors, contracts, and spend across the decentralized Marketing & Communications landscape to establish the baseline for governance design
• Designs, develops, and implements a governance model for vendor, agency, and contractor management, including policies, approval thresholds, decision rights, and escalation paths
• Designs and launches the exceptions process for off-roster and off-policy engagements, including review criteria, approvals, and escalation to marketing leadership
• Builds the initial preferred vendor and agency roster by category and develops the consolidation plan for priority categories to reduce redundancy and improve cost competitiveness, including a sunsetting approach for redundant vendors and agencies
• Designs and launches a single intake process for new vendor and agency requests so that spend is visible and routed to the right approvers before it is committed
• Designs and launches the contractor and freelancer intake, onboarding, and offboarding process, ensuring compliance with worker classification, security, access, and contract requirements in partnership with HR and Legal
• Partners with Finance and Procurement to establish spend controls, PO and SOW discipline, and forecasting practices, and to ensure accurate vendor commitment data supports budget planning and cycle-end processes
• Establishes baseline spend visibility by building dashboards and reporting by vendor, category, and team, and works with business stakeholders to resolve off-policy and off-roster spend
• Defines governance KPIs, such as percent of spend with roster vendors, percent of spend under executed SOW/PO, contractor onboarding cycle time, and off-policy spend trend, and delivers a recurring spend and compliance readout to marketing leadership during the engagement
• Develops marketing’s vendor and agency evaluation standards, including RFP criteria, vendor scorecards, and a roster and performance review cadence, in partnership with Procurement, for the permanent team to run
• Partners with Procurement on commercial terms, including rate cards, renewals, and a contract expiry calendar
• Documents vendor engagement and procure-to-pay workflows, and evaluates and recommends tools that support vendor management and spend tracking
• Drives adoption through change management, training, and communications with Marketing & Communications leaders and teams, reducing friction in the engagement process
• Establishes audit and compliance readiness and identifies vendor risks, including data privacy, security, intellectual property, and vendor use of generative AI, in alignment with corporate procurement, legal, security, and privacy standards
• Develops a sustainment plan with documentation, process guides, and training, and transitions ongoing ownership of governance to the permanent StratOps team before the engagement ends

Requirements:

• Vendor Management
• Spend Management
• Governance and Controls
• Agency Management
• Contract Management
• Contingent Workforce Management
• Vendor Risk Management
• Procurement
• Program Implementation
• Budget Management
• Financial Acumen
• Data Analysis
• Change Management
• Stakeholder Management
• Marketing Operations
• Bachelor's Degree / College
• typically 7+ years in marketing operations, vendor or agency management, procurement, sourcing, or finance operations
• Master's Degree / MBA
• Certifications such as CPSM, PMP, or Lean Six Sigma