Project Manager

JOB SUMMARY
Perform end-to-end management of a single or portfolio of projects with TCV 500K - $1Mn in deliverables based or outcome-based model, by delivering the agreed scope, within the agreed timelines and cost. Fully ensuring the success and acceptance criteria of the project are met and customer satisfaction is enhanced.

Key Responsibilities
- Identify key stakeholders to ensure establishing and maintaining positive business relationships among stakeholders (internal or external)
- Maintain regular communication with customer / partner / supplier; addressing needs through empathy with their environment
- Define activities, responsibilities, critical milestones, resources, skills needs, interfaces and budget. Optimize costs and time utilization, minimise waste and deliver projects on time, and budget as per the contract and agreed scope, with a high quality result.
- Anticipate all possible risks and manage them by applying the suitable risk management strategy; developing contingency plans.
- Define and implement the governance model as per the project needs
- Plan and implement metrics driven management model and quantitatively assess the project health
- Orchestrate projects to develop or implement new, internal or externally defined processes to meet identified business needs.
- Effective implementation of software delivery methodologies and instil customer's confidence
- Build, manage and nurture high performing teams, providing individual and team mentoring, ensuring high levels of team engagement, and developing capabilities within team, ensuring seamless communication and resolving conflicts
- Adopt and build software engineering best practices which can be leveraged by other teams

Typical performance measures:
- Sprint velocity/team productivity
- Planned schedule vs actual
- Planned effort vs actual
- Planned cost vs actual
- Retention
- Requirement stability and effectiveness of scope change management
- Product quality (rework effort, defect density, defect leakage in various phases and number of rejected defects)
- Risk management index
- Adoption of reusable components and artefacts
- Customer satisfaction
- Team satisfaction

Performance Areas:
Scope Management
- Conduct requirements analysis, requirements elicitation, scope control, and scope prioritization based on customer needs and scope change management
- Drive the creation of common standards such as design documents, traceability matrix, bridge documents, analysis methodologies and solution artefacts
- Partner with the customer to define their requirements / elicit requirements from solution envisioning workshop
- Manage customers expectations by pre- planning deliverables like wireframes, prototypes, demos, MVPs etc
- Conduct impact analysis of any scope changes across phases and negotiate with the customer for scope prioritization

Estimation and Resource Planning
- Consolidate estimates at a solution level, evaluate risks and validate estimates from a technical standpoint, assumptions, and defining scope and boundaries
- Review, validate and negotiate estimates across service lines
- Conduct resource planning (pyramid, people development) at a project level based on project requirements
- Conduct impact analysis for changes and analyze corresponding impact to overall estimates and resource loading
- Identify the different roles and skills for each role, considering the constraints, pre-requisites and other project specific KPIs

Project/ Schedule Management
- Identify and plan the end-end activities required to meet the project acceptance criteria
- Plan and manage multiple small/ medium size projects/ modules as defined within UST
- Identify risks and mitigation strategies and implement the same to manage simple, small or medium size projects/ modules
- Anticipate items that cause schedule delays, schedule dependencies and manage them following the proper risk management plan
- Identify options to fast track the schedule and plans to implement the same
- Estimate the work, plan and track the activities closely and report the progress on a regular basis

Risk/Issue management
- Proactively identify any dependencies that might impact the project KPIs, facilitate agreement with dependency owners and closely track them on the plan
- Identify and closely track the risks in the project and follow escalation path
- Document the risks and issues in the project, communicate them to all relevant stakeholders and closely track the impact

Stakeholder Management
- Identify the internal and external stakeholders on the project
- Define the RACIA chart and communicate the roles/responsibilities to the stakeholders
- Define the communication plan and implement the same
- Ensures that stakeholder needs, concerns or complaints are understood and addressed

Test and Defect Management
- Ensure the test approach is defined and agreed for the project
- Support system integration testing (functional / technical)
- Review/mentor team during test execution
- Support defining the test strategy and scenarios
- Understand the business impact of defects
- Prioritize the defects based on their criticality and severity
- Participate in defect triage meetings
- Identify and analyse root cause of defects
- Interpret the results

Configuration Management
- Ensure and drive the process within the scope of the project
- Provide information / articulate / demonstrate work during configuration audits and implement corrective action

Software Development Process Tools & Techniques
- Define/adopt the right tooling strategy for the project
- Independently guide the team to develop efficient and high-quality work products
- Meet project goals, ensure process compliance and mentor the team

Governance
- Create continuous quality improvement plan
- Define QA processes / plan
- Tailor organization's quality guidelines and benchmarks to meet specific project quality requirements and processes
- Identify root causes and implement necessary preventive/corrective actions to proactively address challenges that might impact project KPIs

Domain / Industry Knowledge
- Guide team members to conduct research to keep abreast of the key business environment and competitive landscape
- Understand how the proposed solution meets client requirements
- Identify the key industry parameters to achieve market sensing

Technology Concepts
- Understand customer's technology landscape
- Map business requirements to technology requirements
- Set expectations with the customer
- Leverage that knowledge in day-to-day work or upgrading skills of the team
- Provide inputs on potential areas of opportunity for UST

Profitability Management
- Analyse profitability for project
- Create profitability sheet based on resource plan
- Modify parameters in the profitability sheet and identify impact on margins
- Carry out basic deal pricing
- Apply project principles for improving the project profitability

Pricing & Licensing Models
- Define the pricing models for medium complex projects
- Conduct estimation for "complex" projects viz. FP / value-based pricing, etc.
- Understand pricing strategies and business models of relevant products, solutions or associated services
- Review "simple" proposals

Knowledge Management (KM)
- Establish a KM plan and platform that can be leveraged by new joiners to the project
- Establish a platform to enable knowledge sharing among the project team members
- Ensure that the learnings from the project are contributed to the KM repository
- Ensure that the organization level KM Platforms (platform and content) is enabled for consumption by the project

Account Management Processes and Tools
- Comply with account management activities and drive towards the account management KPIs relevant for the project
- Ability to write contracts in a language mitigating potential risks.
- Collaborate with other projects and enabling functions to deliver value to UST and to the customer in terms of ideas, automation, etc

Solution Structuring
- Present the proposed solution to the customer highlighting the solution benefits and road map to achieve
- Understand the end in mind and define Win Themes. Carve out simple solution / POC to build confidence in the solution
- Review the proposal for completeness

Self-Development and Organizational initiatives
- Review other project artefacts with health assessment
- Actively participate in forums like PM forums and share best practices and learnings from own projects
- Adopt learnings and reusable methodologies/tools from other projects to improve productivity and quality
- Constantly enhance knowledge and implement the same to leverage the best software engineering methodologies, concepts, automation, etc

Team Development
- Implement a framework to assess the skill level of the team and work with the team to define a skill enhancement plan
- Nurture the innovation potential within the team and harness it to positively impact the project outcomes
- Provide feedback and enable the team to perform independently and grow
- Identify the career aspirations of the team members and guide/coach them to define a development plan to achieve the same

Required Qualifications
Skill Examples:
- Impact and Influence
- Relationship building
- Project strategy planning
- Identify project risks and define action plans to manage
- Define a project plan by breaking it down into individual project tasks
- Communicate project progress to all relevant parties reporting on topics such as cost control, schedule achievements, quality control, risk avoidance and changes to project specifications
- Delegate tasks and manage team member contributions appropriately
- Manage external, contracted resources to achieve project objectives
- Optimize project portfolio timelines and delivery objectives by achieving consensus on stakeholder priorities
- Assess the project heath using quantitative measures and change the course of action as needed
- Conflict management within the team and with external stakeholders
- Collaborate with different techno-functional teams within own and customer organization to ensure the right standards and practices are implemented

Knowledge Examples:
- A project methodology, including approaches to define project steps and tools to set up action plans
- Technologies to be implemented within the project
- Company business strategy and business processes
- Development and compliance with financial plans and budgets
- IPR principles and regulation
- Structured project management methodologies (e.g. agile techniques)
- Estimation techniques
- Metrics analysis and quantitative management
- Root cause analysis
- People management including goal setting, growth aspects and coaching
- Understanding of the quality and governance models of UST and the customer; aligning the deliverables to meet those standards