Technical Program Manager

Your role:

Project management staff ensure development, operations, and customer implementation projects are completed smoothly and efficiently.

A Program Manager manages horizontally across multiple Global Relay development projects; engaging with stakeholders and identifying and managing the interdependencies between project teams to ensure that cross-project work effort remains feasible and delivers business value. The Program Manager facilitates processes and supports program execution, escalates impediments, manages risk, and helps drive continuous improvement. Program Managers must have the ability to creatively define the project pacing and obtain incremental benefits before the program is complete.  

Your responsibilities: 

• Take the lead from a project planning and coordination perspective for the delivery of key projects (often involving multiple component teams). This will include working with product management on scope and with component teams on delivery approach and phasing, using product management and delivery management tools.
• Working with component teams, compile work estimates and planning assumptions and provide program management oversight to component-specific release plans. Socialize overall target milestones, per initiative, based on work estimates and assumptions.   
• Identify and coordinate cross-component and cross-product line dependencies throughout the development life cycle and track key project gates (including stakeholder, architectural and security reviews) to completion.
• Work closely with component teams and the owners of integration testing environments to ensure readiness of environments and effective alignment/co-ordination across teams for integration tests, refining the approach taken with this as Global Relay moves to increasing agility.
• Work with colleagues and key stakeholders at component team-specific and cross-team levels to actively remove any obstacles blocking progress and ensure releases and initiatives are tracking to schedule, escalating to engineering management or senior program management as appropriate.
• Proactively identify and manage delivery risks in accordance with Global Relay's risk management framework.
• Track progress against target completion dates of releases and initiatives using Jira and other tools; work with component teams and senior program management to resolve any issues which impact plans.
• Report on progress at the appropriate meetings (project-specific and company-wide) in accordance with Global Relay's project and program management framework.  
• Acquire an understanding of the design, business logic, and technical architecture of the relevant products which is deep/detailed enough to support effective project delivery for priority initiatives.  
• Be a champion for process improvements including those which will improve project predictability; identify opportunities to streamline and provide visibility into critical cross-component delivery activities; help teams with their ways of working.
• Provide guidance and assistance in resolving issues and removing roadblocks.
• Provide input on resourcing to address critical bottlenecks.

About you:

• Experience which includes 3+ years of full lifecycle software development project management (as a Project Manager or equivalent role) including planning, monitoring, managing risks and issues, and reporting on project status.
• Experience of project delivery using Agile, Scrum and hybrid development methodologies.
• Experience with driving cross-team initiatives and collaborating with stakeholders across the organization including working with remote teams.
• Experience of working with product management and software delivery management tools such as Productboard and Jira, or equivalent.  
• Self-starter with can-do approach who finds effective ways of getting the job done.
• Strong organizational, planning, stakeholder management and documentation skills. 
• Strong technical background through education and/or work experience.
• Comfortable with diving into the detail to support teams with project delivery, including ensuring all the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed in SDLC process terms.
• Ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical individuals including being able to adjust communication style depending on the individual and situation.
• Ability to engage with teams/stakeholders and build positive relationships, through questions (when appropriate) in support of project delivery. Such questions might help risks to be surfaced, issues to be resolved, or might provide friendly “challenge” to ways of working.
• Ability to get up to the required speed on product business logic and architecture through self-directed on-the-job learning. 
• Experience with either SaaS, messaging platform(s) or data integration for enterprise markets (desirable).
• One or more agile/project management qualifications (desirable), e.g. Project Management Professional (PMP), Prince2 Practitioner.