Sr. Project Manager

Accela provides cloud-based government software that helps communities improve efficiency, transparency, and citizen engagement. The Senior Project Manager will lead the end-to-end delivery of large, complex Professional Services implementations, managing budgets, risks, customer relationships, cross-functional teams, tooling, and go-live transitions.

Responsibilities:

• Project Management: Manage engagements start-to-finish by applying standard and accepted project management principles; lead project planning and budgeting; mobilize and direct the work streams of cross-functional project teams; champion the Statement of Work; convert scope change into a change order rather than letting the team absorb it silently
• Project Health: Drive on-time and on-budget completion of projects; track project progress and variability; maintain a RAID log - risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies - as the working record; work collaboratively with customer and internal teams to identify risks; develop and execute appropriate risk mitigation strategies within a defined escalation path; implement appropriate tracking and reporting metrics in a manner that provides transparency and visibility into project health; run a weekly budget-burn review - hours consumed against hours contracted, percent complete against percent budget - to surface at-risk engagements early; report on-time go-live rate, budget variance, time-to-go-live and SLA attainment
• Tooling and Project Record: Run your engagements in Jira against the standard implementation project template - consistent epics, issue types, workflow states and a definition of done per phase - rather than a parallel tracker; keep the per-customer space current with environments, contacts, configuration decisions, go-live checklists and retro notes; maintain per-customer dashboards and saved filters so status, aging and blocked items are visible to leadership without a bespoke report; contribute requirements for Jira, GitHub and configuration-repository integration so work is traceable from issue to deployment
• Go-Live and Transition: Own the go-live readiness review; make the handoff into Customer Success and support a defined event with explicit acceptance criteria rather than a fade-out; run a lessons-learned review after every go-live and feed the findings into the implementation playbook
• Customer Relationship Management: Foster an environment of highly effective and collaborative communications in day-to-day interactions with clients and stakeholders; serve as the first point of escalation on the project; support Regional Director in executive steering committees; track customer-side dependencies as the real critical path - workflow decisions, record type and Standard Choice sign-off, test participation, approvals and training scheduling; initiate escalation when a customer is unresponsive or a configuration decision is stuck, rather than leaving the implementer to chase it
• Cross Functional Teamwork: Lead and support collaboration across many internal stakeholder groups - Consultants, Architects, Project Management Office, Cloud Operations, Product, Support, Partners and others. On joint Civic Platform and ePermitHub programs, coordinate with the counterpart project manager on dependency mapping, milestone alignment and shared-risk visibility, and represent the program's scope in steering meetings
• Business Development: Support initiatives to grow new business and expand existing projects; participate in aspects of the proposal development process and budget estimation

Requirements:

• 5 years leading successful implementations of COTS software/platform-based solutions for Tier-1 government clients, or clear evidence of navigating slow, committee-driven stakeholder groups
• 5 years leading projects of $1M+ budget, 12+ months duration, and involving more than one government department or group
• Proven ability to manage multiple complex projects that are at various stages of delivery
• Comfortable owning budget and burn, and having scope conversations directly with customers
• Aptitude for understanding and applying new technologies and methodologies
• BA or BS in a technical discipline, or similar technical degree program
• Use of formal project management tools (e.g., MS-Project, Visio, etc.)
• Working proficiency in Jira and Confluence, including building boards, dashboards and saved filters - not only working tickets
• Strong technical background, with previous experience with delivery of enterprise class software - enough technical literacy to read a configuration repository and a workflow diagram without needing translation
• Strong analytical skills and experience managing technical and project management issues
• Strong organizational skills with an ability to manage competing client demands
• Ability to interact and communicate with CxO-level personnel
• Excellent communications and interpersonal skills
• Ability to travel up to 50% percent of the time
• Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) preferred; skilled at identifying the appropriate strategies and tools for planning and tracking complex projects and driving teams to high productivity
• Permitting and Licensing knowledge desired