Project Lead - client facing

Job Description

We are working as strategic PM for a technical delivery partner to support our clients to modernize processes to prepare for moving to SaaS student information systems. Clients are progressing work with our delivery partner across multiple service lines who all work in slightly different ways and we are using simple but effective project management approaches to help centralise activity to track this and provide visibility to the client. The differentiator for our candidate selection will be on the soft skills below.

You will be:

• Working as the centralised conduit for all the work and projects progressing with the client
• Support our partner teams to deliver successfully
• Providing project management discipline to the work including weekly reporting, action tracking, central governance for the teams and the client, risk tracking, planning and coordination of activities
• There will be a change team, but you may have to support some of the coordination of change and comms activity (they follow the PROSCI methods)
• You will lead a project coordinator (provided by the delivery partner) to help you with the project including scheduling, client liaisons and time sheeting for the teams. They will have access to internal systems and support
• This role will require 4 / 5 hours per week of effort

Soft skills

• Extremely high standard of communication skills – you will be working between a delivery partner and the client, and things don’t always go smoothly
• Build trusting and authentic relationships
• Extremely organised and able to stick to a weekly cadence of activity
• Systematic approach to project assets and management activity
• Able to work with an unstructured team on the delivery partner side, let things slide at times and help them feel supported
• Be able to work with some ambiguity, manage things back to the centre calmly if they the delivery team takes things offline and manage things with charm and kindness
• Work with service line managers how have always worked in a different way, with respect and care
• Able to work with ai tools to create efficiencies (tools and training provided)
• Be able to invent as we go, we have carried out a few POCs but there is still a lot of learning on these projects. Thoughts and ideas on how we can use simple methods to add value are welcome.

Tools and methods

• Smartsheet
• Box
• Outlook
• Slack
• PROSCI