Position Summary
The Senior Project Manager will report to the Director of Operations within Water Revenue Bureau and will work closely with the steering committee, vendor(s), subject matter experts, and other stakeholders to facilitate the replacement of the legacy water billing solution with a modernized customer information system (CIS). The Senior Project Manager will lead the effort through planning, procurement, and implementation of the selected solution, playing a critical role in the success of the project by ensuring that it is completed on time, within budget, and to the required quality standards.
Essential Functions
The successful candidate will:
- Develop, clarify, and manage the scope of the project and achieve targeted outcomes in collaboration with the steering committee and other stakeholders (i.e., develop work plans to document the legacy water billing system and identify the requirements for a new CIS application, analyze the business impact and change management approach for the new system)
- Ensure project requirements are achieved in a timely fashion and within budget guidelines
- Create and maintain full-scale project plans, progress reports, requirements documentation, presentations, and associated communication documents
- Plan and schedule project timelines and milestones using appropriate tools, tracking project milestones and deliverables, and estimate the resources and participants needed to achieve project goals
- Control changes in project scope, identify potential risks, manage risk factors, and devise contingency plans
- Manage communication with project stakeholders, reporting on progress, and engaging them in decision-making processes as appropriate
- Ensure compatibility and consistency with existing architectural and enterprise standards, working closely with the Office of Innovation and Technology (OIT)
- Assemble project team, identify needed resources, assign responsibilities, and develop timeframes to facilitate successful completion of project activities and deliverables
- Lead the procurement and contracting process
- Coordinate and communicate timely and accurately with internal stakeholders, partners, vendors, and other outside stakeholders
- Analyze processes and make recommendations for optimizing resources and product delivery
- Ensure effective communication between technical and non-technical functions
- Perform cost/benefit analysis of actions and initiatives
- Schedule meetings and document minutes
- Prepare timely and concise status reports and dashboards for presentation to mid and senior level management
- Oversee day-to-day vendor activities and assure conformance of deliverables to requirements
- Drive and support change management, including business process changes necessitated by the project and communication efforts to educate business users and other project stakeholders
Competencies, Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
- Solid understanding of principles of project management, System Development Life Cycle methodology, and budgeting and the ability to tailor the PMBOK framework to meet organizational needs
- In depth knowledge with expertise in one or more of the following modules: customer data, billing, customer care, payment processing, data transfer
- Proven ability to understand business objectives, define business requirements and apply various solutions
- Strong background in business process analysis, defining business requirements, application engineering, and/or application of various technical solutions
- Excellent skills in new product evaluation, architecture, and implementation
- Demonstrate experience in large systems, process, and people integration activities
- Manage all assigned projects to completion ensuring on-time delivery, meeting budgetary demands and maintenance of overall project ownership
- Work independently and adapt to changes in project priorities and responsibilities
- Plan, organize and direct the work activities of project team, including outside consultants
- Establish and maintain effective working relationships with associates, departmental officials, outside consultants and vendors
- Excellent analytical and strong problem-solving skills - communicate in a clear and succinct manner and effectively evaluate information/data to make decisions; anticipates obstacles and develops plans to resolve; creates actionable strategies and operational plans
- Excellent communications skills: able to communicate effectively with stakeholders and senior business leadership, IT, and functional managers at all levels; able to influence and engage across multiple teams; excellent verbal and written communication, cross-team training, and documentation skills
- Experience in large scale, legacy billing systems
- Experience in Customer Information System (CIS) implementation
- Knowledge of Revenue collections processes is preferred
- Ability to learn, understand, and interpret processes, systems, technical material, rules, regulations, instructions, reports, etc. and apply what is learned
- Ability to manage time effectively, set priorities appropriately, operate with minimal supervision, work and act independently/as part of a team and maintain professional demeanor under stress
- Excellent team player – collaborates well with others to solve problems and actively incorporates input from various sources; has experience working with others on a global basis
- Demonstrated customer focus – evaluates decisions through the eyes of the customer; builds strong customer relationships; creates processes with customer viewpoint; partners with customers to help shape their future initiatives
- Change oriented – actively generates process improvements; champions and drives change initiatives; confronts difficult circumstances in creative ways, balances multiple and competing priorities and executes accordingly
- Strong knowledge of MS Project, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and SharePoint