Project Manager

Project Manager

Our client, a leading independent investment management firm, is seeking an experienced Project Manager for a 3 month contract-to-hire role in Atlanta, GA. This role is hybrid, in office 4 days per week.

Role Purpose

Support accountable project delivery by building and maintaining project plans and timelines, tracking internal hours against estimates, managing risks, issues, assumptions, and dependencies, and providing clear visibility across project teams and stakeholders.

Job Summary

Seeking a Project Manager to support delivery of cross-functional initiatives that span multiple teams, business functions, technologies, and external partners. This role requires an organized, detail-oriented project professional who can bring structure to project activities, maintain accurate plans and documentation, and drive timely follow-through on commitments. This individual will support projects through planning, execution, governance, operational transition, and closeout. The successful candidate must be comfortable collecting and validating inputs, tracking internal hours against estimates, managing risks and issues, documenting decisions, following up on actions, and escalating blockers early. The ideal candidate has experience supporting technology, security, risk, audit or transformation projects involving multiple stakeholders, detailed timelines, interdependent deliverables, and competing priorities. Projects span the full Global Security Division (GSD) portfolio, including audits, regulatory requirements, risk, assessments, and physical security initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

Project Leadership and Coordination

• Support project initiatives consisting of multiple activities, deliverables, stakeholders, and dependencies.
• Help define project objectives, scope, success criteria, milestones, and measurable outcomes.
• Establish and maintain project routines, documentation, and decision records that support effective execution.
• Create clarity and alignment when requirements, priorities, assumptions, or dependencies change.
• Coordinate across business, technology, security, legal, compliance, finance, procurement, operations, and external partners as needed.

Project Planning and Timeline Management

• Collect and validate estimates, timelines, assumptions, dependencies, risks, and delivery inputs from project team members and stakeholders.
• Build and maintain detailed project plans, schedules, milestones, work breakdown structures, critical paths, and implementation timelines aligned to approved objectives.
• Coordinate activities across teams to ensure alignment on deliverables, owners, due dates, and commitments.
• Monitor schedule progress and identify variances, constraints, or dependencies that may affect delivery.
• Maintain accurate project documentation throughout the project lifecycle.

Project Execution and Delivery

• Track execution across scope, schedule, milestones, deliverables, dependencies, risks, issues, decisions, and change activities.
• Proactively identify gaps, blockers, overdue actions, and delivery risks; facilitate mitigation and escalate appropriately to maintain momentum.
• Lead project meetings and follow-ups, ensuring clear decisions, action items, owners, and target dates.
• Drive accountability and transparency across internal teams, external partners, and stakeholders.
• Support corrective actions and project course corrections when scope, schedule, assumptions, or delivery conditions change.

Effort Tracking and Constraint Management

• Track internal hours and vendor effort against approved estimates and planned allocations.
• Identify and communicate material effort variances, capacity constraints, schedule impacts, and dependency risks early.
• Partner with project and functional leads to validate actual effort, remaining estimates, and potential delivery impacts.
• Maintain clear supporting information for effort reporting and leadership discussions.

Governance, Reporting, and Stakeholder Communication

• Prepare clear project status updates, dashboards, meeting recaps, action summaries, and leadership materials.
• Create and maintain RAID logs covering risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies.
• Provide visibility into project health, milestones, accomplishments, upcoming deliverables, decisions, effort variances, and items requiring attention.
• Communicate risks, issues, blockers, and decision needs clearly and escalate items requiring leadership support.
• Support governance forums, project reviews, and decision-making meetings.

Vendor and Third-Party Coordination

• Coordinate vendor activities, deliverables, timelines, follow-ups, risks, and dependencies.
• Monitor third-party commitments and escalate performance or delivery concerns.
• Ensure vendor activities align with project objectives, enterprise standards, risk requirements, and governance processes.

AI-Enabled and Data-Driven Delivery

• Use AI-enabled tools to improve project planning, documentation, meeting summaries, action tracking, reporting, analysis, and risk identification.
• Identify opportunities to improve efficiency, quality, governance, and reporting through automation and advanced tooling.
• Apply AI responsibly in alignment with enterprise policies, confidentiality, data protection, and governance requirements.

Value Realization, Transition, and Closeout

• Support tracking of project outcomes, success measures, risk reduction, and expected value.
• Coordinate formal closeout activities, including delivery validation, required documentation, lessons learned, and transition follow-ups.
• Confirm project artifacts, decisions, and closeout materials are complete and stored appropriately.
• Identify opportunities to improve templates, reporting, documentation, and project delivery routines.

Collaboration and Capability Building

• Build trusted relationships across distributed and cross-functional teams.
• Promote consistent project management standards, knowledge sharing, and continuous improvement.
• Foster accountability, transparency, proactive communication, ownership, and results-oriented execution.

Qualifications

• Minimum of 3 years of project coordination or project management experience supporting cross-functional initiatives.
• Experience supporting projects of low to moderate complexity across multiple teams or functions.
• Demonstrated ability to build and maintain project plans, schedules, milestones, action logs, RAID logs, and status reporting.
• Experience tracking actual effort or internal hours against approved estimates and communicating material variances.
• Experience creating project budget estimates and tracking project spend against budget.
• Strong proficiency in project and collaboration tools such as ServiceNow, PowerPoint, Excel, Jira, Confluence, Microsoft Planner, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Copilot, and related enterprise tooling.
• Experience producing clear status updates, dashboards, meeting notes, action logs, and presentations for project stakeholders.
• Hands-on experience using AI-enabled tools to enhance planning, documentation, analysis, reporting, and communication.
• Strong communication, organization, follow-through, facilitation, and stakeholder coordination skills.
• Ability to identify and communicate risks, issues, blockers, dependencies, and decision needs clearly and early.
• Familiarity with Agile and Waterfall delivery approaches.
• Experience coordinating with vendors or third-party suppliers to track deliverables, timelines, follow-ups, risks, and dependencies.

• Experience supporting technology, cybersecurity, risk, audit, or enterprise transformation initiatives.
• Experience supporting enterprise platform implementations or technology deployments involving multiple stakeholders and operational teams.
• Experience working in highly regulated environments.
• Familiarity with cloud technologies, enterprise applications, security operations, identity and access management, data protection, vulnerability or exposure management, and governance projects.
• Exposure to portfolio management, strategic planning, demand management, and investment governance processes.
• CAPM, CSM, SAFe, PMP, PMI-ACP, or equivalent certification or experience.

Skills and Personal Attributes

• Strong organizational and time-management skills with consistent attention to detail.
• Ability to clarify expectations, organize work, and follow through on commitments.
• Proactive follow-up mindset with comfort raising risks, issues, blockers, variances, or missing information early.
• Analytical and able to translate project information into clear, actionable updates.
• Adaptable and comfortable supporting changing project needs in dynamic environments.
• Collaborative team player who builds trust while supporting accountability and delivery discipline.
• Clear, professional, and transparent communicator in written and verbal settings.