Senior Project Manager

We are looking for a highly experienced, hands-on Senior Project Manager / Project Delivery Lead to lead a complex enterprise technology implementation for a Tier-1 global financial institution.

This is not a project coordinator or project administration role. The successful candidate will be accountable for end-to-end delivery governance and must be capable of independently managing project planning, execution, milestones, scope, dependencies, risks, quality, financial/delivery commitments, and client communications.

The individual must be highly data-driven, able to identify delivery risks early, maintain an accurate and defensible project position, and confidently lead discussions with senior client and internal stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities:

• Own overall project delivery across requirements, grooming, development, QA, UAT, release, production deployment, and hypercare.
• Establish and maintain clear project milestones, deliverables, ownership, dependencies, and completion criteria.
• Continuously track baseline vs. actual vs. forecast dates.
• Identify delivery slippage early and establish corrective and recovery actions.
• Ensure commitments made to the client are tracked through completion.
• Drive cross-functional teams toward agreed delivery milestones.
• Demonstrated hands-on expertise in Microsoft Project (MPP) is mandatory.
• Independently create, maintain, and manage detailed end-to-end integrated project plans in Microsoft Project.
• Develop project schedules covering requirements/grooming, development, QA, UAT, release, production deployment, and hypercare.
• Establish and manage project baselines.
• Maintain baseline, actual, and forecast dates throughout project execution.
• Define and manage task dependencies, predecessors/successors, milestones, constraints, and critical paths.
• Regularly update MPP schedules based on actual delivery progress.
• Identify schedule slippage and quantify downstream milestone impacts.
• Build recovery and catch-up plans when delivery deviates from the baseline.
• Model schedule impacts resulting from scope changes, dependencies, resource constraints, and changes in delivery velocity.
• Translate detailed MPP schedules into executive-level milestone views and client-facing delivery plans.
• Ensure alignment between MPP, Jira, RAID/dependency trackers, and client status reporting so that all governance artifacts reflect a consistent delivery position.
• Establish and maintain strong project governance and reporting discipline.
• Ensure Jira accurately reflects current project status and delivery progress.
• Reconcile Jira, MPP, project trackers, and client-facing status reports.
• Track planned vs. actual delivery at milestone and workstream levels.
• Ensure scope, story counts, completion percentages, milestone dates, and forecasts are validated before client reporting.
• Ensure risks, issues, actions, and dependencies have clear owners and target resolution dates.
• Produce fact-based project reporting rather than commentary-based status reporting.
• Proactively identify risks before they become delivery or milestone issues.
• Maintain comprehensive RAID and dependency tracking.
• Quantify the schedule and delivery impact of dependencies.
• Establish required-by dates for external and internal dependencies.
• Identify dependencies affecting the project critical path.
• Establish mitigation and contingency plans.
• Escalate risks early with supporting facts and evidence.
• Drive owners to closure rather than simply documenting risks and issues.
• Provide recovery options when milestones are at risk.
• Act as a senior delivery representative in client-facing discussions.
• Lead project status, governance, planning, risk, dependency, and escalation discussions.
• Communicate confidently with senior client and internal stakeholders.
• Present complex delivery situations clearly and concisely.
• Ensure escalations are supported by accurate project data and evidence.
• Professionally challenge assumptions where project data supports a different conclusion.
• Maintain clear documentation of decisions, commitments, assumptions, and actions.
• Build and maintain client confidence through transparency, accuracy, and proactive communication.
• Maintain strong control over project scope, particularly within a fixed-price/fixed-budget engagement.
• Maintain clear scope baselines.
• Prevent uncontrolled scope expansion.
• Identify and document changes affecting scope, timeline, effort, or delivery commitments.
• Quantify the schedule and resource impacts of proposed changes.
• Maintain appropriate change and decision logs.
• Ensure material changes follow agreed change-control processes.
• Clearly differentiate between defects, requirements clarifications, enhancements, and change requests.
• Work closely with QA, engineering, architecture, and business teams to establish measurable readiness criteria.
• Track QA and UAT progress against the project baseline.
• Ensure defects and testing dependencies are accurately reported.
• Monitor defect trends and their impact on milestones.
• Track QA automation progress where applicable.
• Drive timely resolution of UAT blockers.
• Ensure regression testing and release-readiness activities are incorporated into the overall plan.
• Ensure go-live decisions are based on objective delivery and quality information.
• Own preparation and execution of project governance activities, including daily delivery checkpoints, Start-of-Day / End-of-Day reviews where applicable, weekly project status meetings, RAID and dependency reviews, milestone reviews, release-readiness reviews, client governance meetings, Steering Committee updates, executive escalations, and recovery-plan reviews.
• Status reporting must be data-driven, concise, current, and supported by underlying delivery evidence.

Required Skills and Experience:

• 8+ years of overall technology delivery/project management experience.
• 5+ years managing complex enterprise software implementations.
• Demonstrated experience managing projects within banking or financial services.
• Demonstrated experience managing fixed-price or fixed-scope engagements.
• Strong hands-on knowledge of Microsoft Project (MPP).
• Demonstrated ability to independently create and maintain complex integrated project schedules.
• Strong knowledge of project baselining, critical-path management, dependencies, forecasting, milestones, and recovery planning.
• Strong hands-on experience with Jira and Agile project delivery.
• Strong experience with RAID management, scope/change control, dependency management, forecasting, and project governance.
• Ability to manage requirements, development, QA, UAT, release, and production-readiness workstreams simultaneously.
• Experience managing geographically distributed offshore/onshore teams.
• Proven ability to lead project status and escalation discussions with senior client stakeholders.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to operate independently with limited senior-management intervention.
• Highly organized with exceptional attention to project data accuracy and delivery commitments.

Preferred Skills:

• PMP, PRINCE2 Practitioner, PMI-ACP, or equivalent project management certification.
• Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), PSM, or equivalent Agile certification.
• Pega implementation/delivery experience.
• PCBA certification or strong functional understanding of Pega.
• Pega Smart Investigate / Smart Investigate Agentic Automation experience.
• Banking payments experience.
• Knowledge of SWIFT, ISO 20022, Fedwire, and payment investigation/exception-management processes.
• Previous experience delivering major technology programs for Tier-1/global financial institutions.
• Experience managing regulated enterprise production releases.

Skills

Jira, MPP, Microsoft Project, RAID