Senior Project Manager

Compensation: $78.00/hour

Onsite Requirement: Will be required to be onsite three days a week and will be able to work from home for two days a week. This position requires a full-time work schedule of 40 hours per week, and occasional off-hours meetings to accommodate team members in other time zones. Onsite in either Owings Mills, MD or Baltimore, MD

Project Length: 6 Months

Client Industry: Wealth Management
Summary:
The Senior Project Manager will be responsible for the successful management and execution of enterprise wide, cross-functional, strategic programs that are of moderate to high risk and complexity. The Senior Project Manager work under the direction of a Program Manager.

Principal Responsibilities: Manage projects (90%) -
• Deliver business value. Lead matrixed teams of project management professionals and subject matter experts to effectively deliver expected outcomes for multiple interrelated projects.
• Plan projects. Together with the program manager, sponsors, and stakeholders, plan across multi-year projects: schedule, scope, cost, resourcing, and interdependencies.
• Facilitate problem solving. Manage meetings so that they produce expected outcomes. Communicate (verbally and in writing) to all levels of colleagues in ways that support problem solving and planning. Seek consensus wherever possible. Debate opinions, test understanding, and clarify judgments. Bring conflict into the open empathetically. Explain the context of multiple interrelated situations, ask probing questions, and solicit expert advice prior to making recommendations or taking action.
• Analyze data. Evaluate sources, and collates and compares findings for bias, omission and accuracy. Conduct objective analysis. Prioritizes information by source.
• Monitor and provide status. Deploy resources (time, people, systems) to monitor projects and provide status reports.
• Communicate constantly. Maintain effective communication. Share ideas, issues, and opportunities, and build a culture of information sharing.
• Manage risk. Track and review risks and issues. Proactively conduct business review meetings and take corrective action.
• Coordinate with other projects. Actively promote alignment and compliance with other related programs and projects, as well as with internal dependencies such as risk and compliance.
• Promote continuous improvement in project management. Involve peers and team members in analyzing strengths and weaknesses in performance. Improve efficiency by leading and piloting new approaches.
• Build relationships. Lead collaborative partnerships across multiple business units and functions. Network internally and externally on areas of interest and concern.
• Model exemplary behavior and high standards. Act as a role model for a culture of superior standards, on-time, on-budget delivery, and high quality. Holds self and team members accountable for achievements, publicly recognizing successes.
Develop enterprise project management talent and capabilities (10%)-
• Build broad organizational capabilities related to effective program and project management and adoption of the Enterprise Change Office’s best practices.
• Act as a thought leader across the enterprise on program and project management matters. Promote and personally increase cross-business unit collaboration and knowledge sharing.
• Serve as a role model to others. Coach, develop, and mentor direct and indirect reports.
• Support the organization’s talent management and diversity goals.
Internal Working Relationships:
• Business Sponsors: Be accountable to sponsors for successful execution of program. Work closely with business sponsors to ensure that the program deliverables meet the business needs and are prioritized and resourced appropriately. Additionally, provide status and proactively identifies alternative solutions that may decrease the overall program risks.
• Project professionals: Provide guidance, direction, and timely feedback to project professionals regarding their performance. Resolve issues escalated.
• Subject matter experts: Collaborate with subject matter experts from the business and Technology to design solutions, plan projects, track progress, and manage quality.

External Working Relationships:
• Vendors: Clarifies requirements for vendors’ services and products. Works with vendors to identify interdependencies, schedules, and acceptable standards.
• Consultants: Manages project managers and business process engineering consultants as needed.
• Industry Groups: Actively participates in industry groups and networking forums to ensure that the firm benefits from the latest thinking and best practices within the industry.

Challenges and Decision Making:
Challenges -
• Accountable to define project strategies, roadmaps, goals and objectives that align with the firm’s primary business strategies. Execute on projects and initiatives within the assigned portfolio to deliver on business vision, strategies and value within agreed-upon constraints of budget, schedule, and process/functionality.
• Keep constant and open lines of communication with business sponsors to ensure awareness of changing needs and demonstrate flexibility to manage and adjust plans appropriately.
• Identify organizational impacts and changes required to realize gains in efficiency.

Decision Making -
• Manage interrelated projects to maintain transparency and control over the triple constraints of time, scope, and cost, while actively managing risks and changes.
• Ensure appropriate business resources and process re-engineering resources are assigned to effectively define future data and process flows and get the appropriate signoffs and approvals.
• Identify and work with program /project management teams and business partners to ensure that project plans are aligned with the program goals and objectives and that project interdependencies are identified and scheduled appropriately.
Quantitative Data-
• Indirect—project managers, project planners
Quantitative Aspects-
• The Senior Project Manager is responsible for programs and initiatives with associated budgets valued at upwards of $3-5 million annually.

Required Qualifications:
-Professional skills:
• Demonstrated fluency with both waterfall and agile project management, as well as the SDLC
• Strong knowledge of the PMBOK
• Experience with business process improvement approaches (e.g., Lean Six Sigma)
• Fluency with Microsoft Office suite and SharePoint
• Fluency with Microsoft Project or similar project management software
-Education:
• College degree
-Experience:
• Minimum 5 years in the financial industry
• Minimum 10 years as a project or program manager, managing projects in excess of $5M
• Minimum 5 years managing teams of project professionals and large matrixed teams at all levels of the organization
-Soft skills:
• Insatiable intellectual curiosity
• Superlative communication, both verbal and written (textual and visual)
• Powerful analytical and consultative mindset, offering clients multiple well-developed options to solve business problems
• Obsession with delivering value for customers
• Outstanding client relationship management skills
• Ability to work well with diverse teams (differing backgrounds, business and technical areas, experience, and geography)
• Human-centric approach to change management
Preferred Qualifications:
-Experience
• Experience leading global teams preferred
-Education and certifications
• MBA preferred
• PMP certification preferred
• PgMP certification preferred
• Change management certification (e.g., ProSci) preferred
-Technical skills
• Miro, Microsoft Visio, or similar diagramming software preferred
• Jira or similar task management software preferred