Job summary
The Senior Project Manager is responsible for the successful delivery of a portfolio of product implementations including new system deployments and upgrade-enhancements to existing deployments covering both on-premises client deployment and hosted SaaS deployments. Externally the Senior Project Manager works alongside the client Project team and acts as the face of the Project from the initiation and planning phase through to go live. Internally working alongside the BA-SMEs Product Leads
Responsibilities
Client Interaction -Maintain regular client interaction throughout each phase of the Projects (Initiation-Planning Discovery Build Client UAT Go Live and BAU Handoff) acting as the day-to-day contact point and facilitating contact with other internal resources as required. -Host and attend client meetings (Working Groups Business-technical discovery workshops or Ad-hoc meetings) as required alongside other internal Projects resources to ensure the successful delivery of client commitments and the successful understanding of client requirements (Functional Technical Non-functional). -Facilitate client steering committee calls-meetings as required. -Contribute status and other content to steering pack (status documents including work items high level plans milestone tracking etc.) -Manage Senior external stakeholders and ensure delivery milestones are in line with their expectations. -Respond to client escalations and prepare any materials as required to help manage and close these out. -Track manage and communicate change requests throughout the Project lifecycle. Establishes and shares best in class processes across the PM & wider Meritsoft community to achieve delivery excellence for our clients. Internal Stakeholder Interaction -Provide regular internal status reporting of each managed implementation Project-Portfolio -Escalate internally to the Head of Projects Management either in response to client escalation or as required to help ensure successful fulfilment of all client commitments. -Work with Head of Project Management to understand and forecast resourcing requirements to fulfil client commitments. Also understand resourcing constraints and reflect as necessary into any plans. -Work alongside other Implementation Project Managers and the Head of Project Management - Client Services Director to manage internal dependencies and planning-resource conflicts. -Lead on initiatives involving other implementation Project Managers BAs etc. aimed at improving standard Meritsoft-wide delivery tools-approaches for planning requirements gathering status reporting and issue tracking across all active implementation Projects-Portfolios. -Contribute and where applicable act as Change lead for Project Changes Requests as part of the pre-sales process with respect to implementation milestones and SOW creation. Implementation Management -Responsible for the successful execution of each implementation Project -Portfolio of work being managed. -Work with client Project team to plan initial delivery milestones and ensure they are aligned with client expectations. -Identify and track dependencies risks issues and actions (both internal and those with the client) as necessary to deliver the implementation Project-Portfolios being managed. -Ensure tracking of plan execution against key milestones for the implementation Projects-Portfolios being managed. -Review and refine plan-timelines throughout the Project-Portfolio lifecycle as required in response to internal and external dependencies. -Ensure tracking of requirements and analysis activities by the implementation BAs for the implementations being managed. -Work with implementation BAs to ensure client requirements are well understood and where possible aligned with existing system features and functionality helping to keep new build to a minimum. -Help to identify common requirements-builds to encourage re-use and the development of common product solutions rather than bespoke Project solutions. -Work with implementation BAs to ensure handoff of requirements to the product and engineering teams. -Work with Implementation BAs Product Leads and engineering teams to ensure that requirements can be sized or estimated at a high-level (Epic) or lower-level (Story) and that this is fed back into the planning process to ensure that achievable and realistic delivery commitments are agreed with clients. -Track the progress of the build and configuration phase of implementation being managed to ensure delivery commitments are met. -Facilitate client show and tell sessions during build and configuration phase. -Work alongside Implementation BAs to provide review checkpoint and ultimate sign-off of all testing activity completed by the product and engineering teams before a delivery is made to the client. -Work alongside implementation BAs to provide review of all documentation (User Guide Release Notes Install Guides) completed by the product and engineering teams before a delivery is made to the client. -During Client Testing phase (SIT UAT Parallel) ensure all issues raised are appropriately captured and tracked through to resolution including defect fixing and change management. Plan and manage any additional patches-releases as required and work with the relevant internal resources to keep the Projects-Portfolios on track. -Ensure well managed handover to the support team post go-live