Senior Project Manager

Senior Project Manager

A growing and vibrant university based in London is seeking to recruit a Senior Project Manager on a permanent basis to start as soon as possible.

Reporting to the Head of Strategic Delivery, the aim of this role is to actively deliver multiple, high-profile strategic projects across the business to time, budget and quality.
This is a hands-on role, working across a variety of disciplines and stakeholders within a contemporary higher education environment.

You will be responsible for ensuring project deliverables and outcomes are achieved in line with best practice project management principles, create well-structured documentation that is readily understood by a variety of audiences and maintained throughout the project lifecycle and identify business opportunities and analysis in line with project scope and benefits.

The range of projects you will work on will be across IT, Estates, Finance, Procurement, HR and other areas. We are seeking someone who has experience of working across different projects with different teams.

Role Responsibilities:

• Lead and manage the delivery of multiple strategic projects through active planning, control and staged delivery.

• Create and monitor project and resource plans and drive task delivery against plan, budget and resources to achieve project milestone objectives.

• Actively monitor progress against plan through regular reviews, project controls and validation of project work streams, with dependencies tightly managed and issues resolved in a timely manner.

• Provide quality, timely, relevant and accurate progress reporting and project management information.

• Ensure effective collaboration between all teams and individuals involved in the project including external suppliers/ partners as appropriate.

• Work with executive project sponsor, finance, procurement and key stakeholders on business cases, options analysis, tender and selection processes where assigned.

• Proactively identify, manage and monitor risks, issues, assumptions, dependencies and resources, ensuring that these risks and issues are identified, mitigated and escalated as necessary.

• Work closely with executive project sponsor and user representatives to ensure projects and tasks are delivered in line with plan and customer expectations, including business case and benefits management.

• Work closely with key stakeholders in the design, build and maintenance of a project management framework at the university.

• Work closely with the Head of Strategic Delivery in ensuring that appropriate policies, procedures and tools are in place to maintain the quality of the PMO (and all projects that fall within its remit) to industry standards.

• Lead, co-ordinate, and execute operational user testing and pilot phase implementation ensuring high quality change management and progress reporting.

Essential Skills -
Proven track record as a project manager across higher education or similar complex system environments

Experience in successfully delivering multiple high-profile projects simultaneously across a range of functional operations

Experience of using best practice principles such as Prince2, Agile, MSP, APM, compliance and regulations when running a project

Experience transitioning projects through change controls and stage gates including business case approval, technical design authority, change advisory board, service transition and benefits realisation

Experience managing a project throughout its full life cycle, using key documentation to ensure the project achieves its agreed objectives, in accordance to agreed scope, budget, time and quality

Experience of identifying and managing complex risks issues and dependencies

Stakeholder Relationships -
You will engage with a variety of key stakeholders across the university so effective communication skills and stakeholder liaison experience is paramount.
Key relationships will be across -

• Head of Strategic Delivery
• Executive project sponsors and project teams
• IT, Finance, Estates, BI & Planning, operational and academic teams
• External suppliers

Whilst you won't line manage anyone directly, there will be some matrix management across projects where needed.

If you are looking to expand your career by managing multiple projects across different teams then please apply today. Please note this role is not solely and IT Project Management position and you will be required to have worked across generic projects previously. The role is a hybrid position that requires attendance on site 2 days per week.

The salary range is from £54,000 - £68,000 p.a depending on experience plus excellent benefits including additional holiday days over Christmas closure period, professional development opportunities and generous pension scheme contribution.

Please apply today if interested.