Duration: 1 year plus with possibility to go permanent

Stamford, CT

Our direct client is looking for a Senior Program/Project Manager for a long term contract. The Program/Project Manager drives brilliant execution across IT projects throughout all phases of the project life cycle. This role partners closely with IT teams, the global sourcing vendor, business counterparts, and other key stakeholders to initiate, plan, and manage schedule, budget, scope, project changes, resources, issues, risks, dependencies, and overall project communications including reporting. The role is an integral part of the overall project leadership and is accountable for overall project delivery. Additionally, this role leverages processes, tools and guidelines defined by the PMO in order to carry out his/her responsibilities. 

This position will be directly responsible for managing a large, multi-year program with a budget of $70M+.  The role will be responsible for managing multiple key vendors, coordination of efforts from the vendors and the internal development teams, as well as communicate and engage with senior level stakeholders. 

OF TIME

30%.  Project Initiation and Planning

• Establishes relationships and works closely with the Business Relationship Manager, Business Stakeholders or other internal customers to understand their IT needs and requirements.
• Assists in the initiation and channeling of new project requests through the Demand Management process, ensuring key stakeholder participation early in the process and throughout the project life cycle.
• Coordinates work effort determination for estimate collection.
• Facilitates and works with IT Teams, Stakeholders, Vendor and IT Finance to gain financial project approval (MSR), and Capital Committee approval where applicable.
• Where applicable, assists in prioritization and strategic planning (road maps).

60%   Project Execution, Monitoring and Control

• Accountable for overall project delivery.
• Ensures consistent project execution/delivery by providing direct hands on management of projects and project leadership while maintaining project controls. 
• Understands and ensures compliance with the Application Delivery Methodology (ADM) across all projects (auditable).
• Manages and updates project work plans and drives the necessary project control points (resource plan, budgets, risk and issue logs, planning assumptions, milestones / deliverables, change logs, phase reviews, defects, intra/inter-project dependencies). 
• Drives and ensures compliance with change control process for scope, schedule, budget and other project changes to meet evolving business needs.
• Collects and analyzes project progress and performance and implements corrective actions as necessary.
• Clearly identifies, communicates and proactively manages project critical path, and escalates appropriately.
• Provides clear unbiased insight to project status and health via timely, objective and accurate reporting
• Provides project recommendations (start, stop, hold, continue)

10% PMO Standards and Processes

• Assists in developing, improving, and enforcing PMO standards and processes in conformance with industry best practices such as PMI and CMMI standards as well as company policies.
• Ensures PMO standards and processes conform to and meet key Stakeholder and internal Customer expectations
• Each project manager on the team will own a stewardship area to drive PMO project maturity and capability through standard processes and best practices to deliver predictable results

SUPPORTIVE FUNCTIONS

In addition to performance of the essential functions, this position may be required to perform a combination of the following supportive functions:

• Demonstrates, instills and recognizes key values of a high performing team, including trust, respect, collaboration, accountability, and execution;
• Collaborates on company and industry best practices such as PMI and CMMI across the teams, and ensures knowledge is leveraged across the PM, development and business teams;
• Identifies and implements initiatives to increase the engagement index of the team;
• Represents PMO to the broader organization to communicate and demonstrate our value.
• Delivers ad hoc reporting on projects and participates in and/or leads IT level initiatives to improve engagement scores, and to strengthen our culture. Evaluates and coaches team members.
• Provides mentorship to newly on-boarded team members.
• Actively communicates and celebrates success within PMO, project teams as well as overall IT community.
• Improves and sustaining team morale in the day-to-day work environment; instilling fun where appropriate to improve productivity.

SPECIFIC JOB KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS AND ABILITIES

The individual must possess the following knowledge, skills and abilities and be able to explain and demonstrate that he or she can perform the essential functions of the job, with or without reasonable accommodation, using some other combination of knowledge, skills, and abilities:

Core Skills:

• Requires good communication skills, both verbal and written.
• Must be able to perform a variety of duties and multi-task.
• Strong leadership skills (clear direction, respect, consistency, decisiveness, accountability, conviction, cooperation, good communication)

• Strong industry and business area knowledge
• Ability to maintain a balance of business and technical perspectives
• Good listening skills and ability to innovate and brainstorm around business ideas and needs

• Ability to be resourceful, creative and maintain flexibility

• Industry Standards:  PMI PMP preferred, or strong knowledge of PMBOK
• Tools:  Strength in MS Project (MS Project Server), MS Word, Visio, MS Excel, PowerPoint, Rational’s Tool Suites (ClearQuest, RequisitePro, Rose, ClearCase), Mercury Quality Center
• Processes:  Waterfall, Iterative and/or Agile
• Applications: Strength in Seibel CRM Technology and SAP Financials
• Operating Systems: Familiarity with Windows XP, 2000, NT, HP UX, Solaris
• Languages: Familiarity with object-oriented languages including Java, C++
• Frameworks: Familiarity with J2EE and .NET
• Databases: Familiarity with Oracle, SQL Server

QUALIFICATION STANDARDS

Education: 

4 Year College Degree required; MBA a plus.

Experience:                                          

10+ years program/project management in software development full lifecycle and implementation area required.  Specific experience in business area a plus.

Licenses or Certificates:    

Project Management Professional a plus.