Sr. Project Manager

ABOUT THE ROLE: You will play an important role in Accela’s continued growth and success by ensuring the successful, on-time delivery of large and complex Professional Services implementations. As an integral member of a cross-functional team, you will identify key priorities, develop clear execution plans, and partner across the organization to deliver successful outcomes. You will leverage established processes, tools, and templates to manage projects effectively while remaining adaptable to evolving customer needs and business priorities. At the heart of this role is a strong focus on customer value—balancing the needs of our customers and Accela while helping customers maximize the business value they receive from our solutions. At Accela, we believe meaningful work and a positive employee experience go hand in hand. We value collaboration, connection, and a healthy work-life balance.

If you are motivated by helping governments better serve their communities through more efficient, open, and innovative technology, we’d love to hear from you. SPECIFIC RESPONSIBILITIES: As the owner of the cross-functional Professional Services delivery process you will make significant impacts on the customer and Accela's business in these key areas: - Project Management: Manage engagements start-to-finish by applying standard and accepted project management principles; lead project planning and budgeting; mobilize and direct the work streams of cross-functional project teams; champion the Statement of Work; convert scope change into a change order rather than letting the team absorb it silently. - Project Health: Drive on-time and on-budget completion of projects; track project progress and variability; maintain a RAID log - risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies - as the working record; work collaboratively with customer and internal teams to identify risks; develop and execute appropriate risk mitigation strategies within a defined escalation path; implement appropriate tracking and reporting metrics in a manner that provides transparency and visibility into project health; run a weekly budget-burn review - hours consumed against hours contracted, percent complete against percent budget - to surface at-risk engagements early; report on-time go-live rate, budget variance, time-to-go-live and SLA attainment. - Tooling and Project Record: Run your engagements in Jira against the standard implementation project template - consistent epics, issue types, workflow states and a definition of done per phase - rather than a parallel tracker; keep the per-customer space current with environments, contacts, configuration decisions, go-live checklists and retro notes; maintain per-customer dashboards and saved filters so status, aging and blocked items are visible to leadership without a bespoke report; contribute requirements for Jira, GitHub and configuration-repository integration so work is traceable from issue to deployment. - Go-Live and Transition: Own the go-live readiness review; make the handoff into Customer Success and support a defined event with explicit acceptance criteria rather than a fade-out; run a lessons-learned review after every go-live and feed the findings into the implementation playbook. - Customer Relationship Management: Foster an environment of highly effective and collaborative communications in day-to-day interactions with clients and stakeholders; serve as the first point of escalation on the project; support Regional Director in executive steering committees; track customer-side dependencies as the real critical path - workflow decisions, record type and Standard Choice sign-off, test participation, approvals and training scheduling; initiate escalation when a customer is unresponsive or a configuration decision is stuck, rather than leaving the implementer to chase it.