Senior Program Manager

Title - Senior Program Manager

Location - 5 Days onsite in Atlanta, GA

Duration - 9 Month (Potential Temp to Hire)

Job Description
We are seeking a Senior Program Manager to lead complex, high-visibility initiatives that span multiple teams, business functions, technologies, and external partners. This role requires an experienced leader who can drive execution in ambiguous environments, establish structure where none exists, and influence decisions across all levels of the organization.
This individual will guide initiatives through business case development, funding approval, planning, execution, governance, operational transition, and benefits measurement. The successful candidate must be comfortable presenting options and tradeoffs, challenging assumptions, and driving accountability across stakeholders.
The ideal candidate has successfully led large-scale technology, security, risk, audit, or transformation projects involving multiple workstreams, significant budgets, executive visibility, and competing priorities.

Key Responsibilities

Strategic Project Leadership

• Lead complex initiatives consisting of multiple interconnected workstreams, initiatives, and stakeholders.
• Define project objectives, success criteria, roadmaps, milestones, and measurable business outcomes.
• Establish governance structures and decision-making processes that enable effective execution.
• Create clarity and alignment in environments with evolving priorities, requirements, and organizational dependencies.
• Drive collaboration across business, technology, security, legal, compliance, finance, procurement, operations, and external partners.

Business Case Development and Planning

• Develop business cases, funding requests, executive presentations, cost estimates, and benefits analyses.
• Develop and maintain detailed project plans, schedules, milestones, and delivery timelines aligned to approved business objectives.
• Partner with subject matter experts and leadership teams to validate assumptions, estimates, risks, and projected outcomes.

Project Execution and Delivery

• Drive delivery across the project lifecycle, from inception through implementation and closeout.
• Manage scope, schedule, quality, risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies, interlocks, and change activities.
• Build and maintain project plans, work breakdown structures, critical paths, milestones, dependencies, and implementation plans.
• Track actual effort and internal hours against approved estimates and planned allocations.
• Identify schedule variances, resource constraints, risks, and issues early; facilitate mitigation, corrective action, and timely escalation.
• Coordinate activities across internal teams, external partners, and project stakeholders to ensure alignment on deliverables, timelines, and commitments.
• Maintain program/project documentation, RAID logs, action items, decisions, accomplishments, upcoming deliverables, and status updates throughout the project lifecycle.
• Recommend course corrections when scope, schedule, assumptions, or expected value changes.

Executive Communication and Governance

• Prepare executive-ready presentations, status reports, dashboards, and strategic updates.
• Facilitate steering committees, governance forums, leadership reviews, and decision-making meetings.
• Ensure stakeholders have clear visibility into project health, progress, financials, dependencies, decisions, and expected outcomes.

Effort Tracking and Constraint Management

• Track internal hours, vendor effort, and delivery progress against approved estimates and planned project allocations.
• Surface material variances, capacity constraints, schedule impacts, and dependency risks early.

Vendor and Third-Party Management

• Support vendor evaluations, selection activities, and implementation planning.
• Manage vendor performance, deliverables, risks, dependencies, and issue resolution.
• Ensure third-party delivery aligns with strategic objectives, enterprise standards, risk requirements, and governance processes.

I-Enabled and Data-Driven Delivery

• Use AI-enabled tools to improve planning, estimation, analysis, reporting, risk identification, and decision-making.
• Identify opportunities to improve efficiency, quality, governance, and reporting through automation and advanced tooling.
• Ensure responsible AI use aligns with enterprise policies, confidentiality, data protection, and governance requirements.

Value Realization and Operational Transition

• Define and track key performance indicators, risk reduction measures, business outcomes, and value realization metrics.
• Lead formal closeout, including delivery validation, financial reconciliation, documentation, and lessons learned.
• Conduct post-implementation reviews and communicate realized benefits against approved business cases and strategic objectives.

Leadership and Capability Building

• Build trusted partnerships 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 Required

• 10+ years of experience leading large, complex, cross-functional projects or initiatives in global environments.
• Proven experience supporting complex, executive-facing projects with significant business, technology, risk, or operational impact.
• Demonstrated success leading multiple concurrent projects and interconnected workstreams.
• Experience developing business cases, funding requests, cost estimates, benefits measures, and executive presentations.
• Strong experience with program and project governance, reporting, dependency management, RAID tracking, and effort tracking against approved estimates.
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior leaders and facilitate executive decision-making using clear options, tradeoffs, risks, and recommendations.
• Experience managing vendor relationships, third-party delivery, and enterprise technology implementations.
• Demonstrated ability to make accountable delivery decisions, including escalation, scope tradeoffs, reprioritization, pausing or stopping work, and resetting expectations.
• dvanced proficiency with PowerPoint, Excel, Jira, Confluence, Client Planner, and related enterprise tools.
• Experience using AI-enabled tools to support planning, analysis, reporting, and decision-making.
• Excellent communication, facilitation, negotiation, leadership, and stakeholder management skills.

Preferred

• Experience leading technology, cybersecurity, audit, or enterprise transformation initiatives.
• Experience delivering enterprise platform implementations and large-scale technology deployments involving multiple integrations and operational stakeholders.
• 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.
• Experience supporting portfolio management, strategic planning, demand management, and investment governance processes.
• PMP, PgMP, SAFe, PMI-ACP, or equivalent certification or experience.

Skills and Personal Attributes

• Clear and transparent communicator who can engage effectively at all organizational levels.
• Strong analytical and quantitative skills with the ability to translate complexity into clear, actionable insights.
• Comfortable operating in ambiguity and driving structure, decisions, and execution in complex environments.
• Strategic, initiative-taking, and adaptable problem-solver with sound judgment.
• Collaborative leader who builds trust while maintaining accountability and delivery discipline.
• Highly organized, with strong prioritization, follow-through, and attention to detail.

Success in This Role

• Drives complex initiatives from concept through measurable value realization.
• Identifies risks, dependencies, effort variances, and resource constraints before they threaten delivery.
• Provides actionable recommendations rather than status updates alone.
• Builds realistic project plans, timelines, and delivery approaches that withstand executive scrutiny.
• Creates alignment across business, technology, operational, vendor, and leadership stakeholders.
• Delivers measurable business outcomes, risk reduction, operational efficiency, and strategic value.
• Establishes transparency, accountability, and confidence throughout the delivery lifecycle.
• Course-corrects, pauses, or stops work when value assumptions no longer hold.
• Completes clean closeout with documented outcomes, lessons learned, financial reconciliation, and operational ownership.