[Hiring] Operations & Project Associate @Somewhere

Role Description

The Operations & Project Associate is a high-agency individual contributor on the COO's team who takes assigned operational problems and cross-functional initiatives from ambiguity to verified resolution. You will establish the facts, identify owners and dependencies, build executable work plans, coordinate follow-through, test completed work against approved criteria, and give leadership a concise view of risks, decisions, and next actions.

Key Responsibilities

• Operational investigations and exception resolution
  • Review assigned dashboards, reports, trackers, and source information to identify discrepancies, stalled work, missing evidence, unusual patterns, and unresolved exceptions.
  • Determine what happened, why it happened, who owns each next action, and what the business implications are.
  • Reconcile conflicting information across systems and teams, separating verified facts, assumptions, and remaining unknowns.
  • Drive assigned corrective actions through verified completion and surface root causes that require a change in process, ownership, training, or controls.
• Cross-functional projects and implementation
  • Convert COO-approved priorities into clear outcomes, workstreams, owners, milestones, dependencies, decision points, risks, and completion criteria.
  • Coordinate stakeholders, vendors, requirements, decisions, testing, implementation, and follow-up while maintaining an accurate source of truth.
  • Surface blockers before they become missed commitments and escalate unresolved tradeoffs with evidence and a recommended next step.
  • Validate completed work against acceptance criteria approved by the relevant business or technical owner and ensure recurring ownership is explicit after handoff.
• Operating visibility and decision support
  • Maintain a concise, current view of assigned initiatives and exceptions, including status, aging, owner, next action, deadline, risk, and decisions required.
  • Prepare decision-ready briefings that state the facts, unknowns, underlying cause, implications, options, tradeoffs, and recommended action.
  • Resolve matters within delegated authority and escalate issues requiring executive, functional, clinical, legal, financial, or technical judgment.
  • Reduce the time leadership spends reconstructing context, locating missing information, or chasing routine follow-up.
• Process improvement and documentation
  • Map workflows, ownership, handoffs, decision points, and control gaps before recommending changes.
  • Draft and maintain usable SOPs, implementation guides, checklists, workflow maps, and decision records with the relevant subject-matter experts.
  • Identify unclear ownership, duplicate work, unnecessary handoffs, bottlenecks, and avoidable manual effort.
  • Confirm that documentation reflects approved practice, has a recurring owner, and is usable by the people responsible for execution.
• Audits, reconciliations, and operational quality
  • Support internal audits, reconciliations, implementation reviews, operational quality checks, and corrective-action initiatives.
  • Assemble evidence, compare information across systems, identify missing or inconsistent records, and maintain a clear audit trail.
  • Track findings, decisions, owners, deadlines, remediation status, and supporting evidence through closure.
  • Escalate questions requiring clinical, legal, employment, regulatory, financial, or technical interpretation to the appropriate expert.

Qualifications

• Experience in healthcare, behavioral health, telehealth, insurance-based services, or another regulated environment.
• Experience supporting system implementations, audits, reconciliations, operational reporting, or process redesign.
• Familiarity with data warehouses, EHRs, automation, or AI-enabled workflows.
• Relevant experience: Demonstrated success in operations, project delivery, implementation, business analysis, consulting, healthcare administration, or another cross-functional execution role.
• Analytical problem-solving: The ability to reconcile multiple sources, trace how a process failed, identify root causes, and distinguish evidence from assumption.
• Execution discipline: Strong planning, prioritization, dependency management, follow-up, and closure across concurrent workstreams.
• Written communication: The ability to produce concise decision briefs, status summaries, SOPs, implementation materials, and decision records.
• Data and technology fluency: Comfort with dashboards, spreadsheets, workflow platforms, task-management systems, and unfamiliar software.
• Judgment and influence: The ability to determine what can be resolved independently, what requires escalation, and how to keep work moving without positional authority.
• Accuracy and discretion: A high standard when handling sensitive business, workforce, financial, or healthcare-related information.