Program Manager

Job Title:Program Manager

Location:Piscataway NJ - Hybrid - At least twice in a month

Duration:6-12+ Months Contract

Job Description:

The Program Manager will be responsible for managing enterprise-level programs within the Enterprise Technology portfolio. This individual will work closely with various Project Managers, Product Owners to define the project team and assign responsibilities. The Program Manager will also be responsible for developing a consolidated view of the program, and for program deliverables including calendars, cross-project dependencies, risk analysis, stakeholder coordination, and regular communication of status.

Primary responsibilities include guiding process development at a Program team level and managing high-risk, high-impact, strategic projects across a multi-disciplinary, multi-function group of technologists and business professionals. This requires experience communicating across audiences, effectively defining, and utilizing escalation paths, and updating executive stakeholders.

Program and Project Management Delivery

• Accountable for driving execution and delivery of moderately complex projects or programs from start to finish
• Demonstrates a clear understanding of the program's vision, objectives, scale, and scope of work, expected outcomes, business value and impact, timelines, roadmaps, resource level requirements
• Establishes strong partnerships and engagement with Program or Project Stakeholders
• Create full-scale master program and project schedules and communication plans consisting of multiple projects or components
• Creates governance practices and protocols to control and monitor the program/projects
• Ensure proactive scheduling of key deliverables, milestones, and deliverable tasks
• Establish program and project financial forecasts including resource plans and other expense plans
• Actively participates in process and practice improvements in the project management environment and serves as a catalyst for project management excellence
• Provides management oversight, aligns and leads cross-functional and international project teams to ensure critical day-to-day program/project deliverables progress forward to deliver specified requirements, objectives, and value
• Identifies gaps in the project team's accountability and ownership of deliverables
• Fosters a team environment of self-organization, retrospect to learn and adapt with the goal of delivering the highest value to our guests and cast
• Drives escalations to remediate risks/blockers impeding vendor's forward progression, as necessary

Financial Management

• Responsible for finance/budget responsibilities for programs of high complexity and large budgets
• Analyzes, measures, and recognizes the financial impact of various project actions, participate in analyzing and using financial data to identify key project issues, and maintains budget tracking and monitors budget expenditures

Status Reporting

• Prepares program/project status reports to demonstrate project overall health, key performance indicator (KPI), risk, issues, accomplishments, next steps, and escalation requests
• Proactively identifies and resolves issues and risks on programs/projects to meet program commitments
• Supports executive-level project status presentations and dashboards
• Creates data visualization elements to provide a graphic demonstration of project analytics and metrics

Communication

• Leads with practicality and wisdom during competing priorities and diverse personalities. Operates as an independent and dynamic program leader. Highly adept at influencing without direct authority
• Facilitates Program updates and project team meetings effectively, ensuring the desired outcomes are achieved
• Distributes timely and effective Program or project meeting updates and call-to-action updates across project teams
• Demonstrates effective communication skills to facilitate project-related conversations with technology senior leaders/managers/directors and service owners alike, and driving tasks and project dependencies to completion across multiple supporting teams
• Escalates need for guidance and support to direct manager effectively

Project Management Lifecycle Disciplines

• Demonstrated understanding of product and software development lifecycle processes, procedures, and tools and/or thorough understanding of network infrastructure deployment.
• Demonstrated understanding of technical project delivery with a focus on Agile delivery and Agile delivery tools such as Jira, Rally, VersionOne etc.
• Comfortable at using modern work management and collaboration tools (Smartsheet, JIRA, MS Project on the Web, Confluence, SharePoint/Teams, Slack)

Technical Depth

• Strong Technical services working knowledge in one or more domains with the ability to flex across other domains
• Guidance in Program Management Discipline
• Participates in guiding the team to think Lean and be Agile

Basic Qualifications:

• 5+ years of applicable program management experience
• 3+ years' experience serving in a leadership role on a small to mid-sized Agile development team that was diligently applying Scrum principles, practices, and theory.
• Knowledge of the Retirement Insurance domain is a plus
• Demonstrated total ownership behavior and attitude
• Advanced written and oral communication skills
• Experience across an array of business, reporting, and PM tools (including but not limited to Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and MS Project).

Education:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, business management, project management, or a related field.
• Master's degree preferred but not required

Preferred Certifications, Licenses, Registrations

• PMP, Program management level certifications
• Scrum Master Certification
• SAFe 5.0

Other Preferred Training, Technical Skills Or Knowledge

• Jira and Atlassian Suite
• MS Project
• ServiceNow
• Experience with Agile concepts (SCRUM, Kanban, etc.)