Senior Project Manager

Role purpose

In this role the incumbent performs his duties within the Billing and Information Technology division and reports to the Executive Head of IT Strategy, Project Management Office (PMO) and Digital Acceleration.
The incumbent, as a Senior Project Manager is directly responsible for delivery of project management services and notably, ensuring that key performances indicators in terms of project budgets, project quality and project time are met.
The incumbent is in charge of coordinating the execution of technology project activities for project teams made of both technology resources as well as business units resources, following Project Management Professional standard.
The incumbent is in charge of translating project contractual requirements into project activity streams and closely work with project technology experts to specify work breakdown structure, mapping them to resources, manage dependencies, risks and mitigations.

Key Responsibilities

• Management of Technology resources: The incumbent is capable of managing at a highest disciplined level Solution Architects from both Vodacom and Suppliers so that at any point in time of the project he can provide assurance of project timelines including key milestones such us ready for service (RFS), data migration and go-live to name but a few. While overseeing resources, to be able to follow up project activities and to be able to foresee risks against pre-allocated resources to help the project Sponsor have mitigation plans. In managing resources, the incumbent ensure that deployment of systems/applications on a specific project that involves integrations with third parties that detailed sub-projects’ plans are in place for each third party.

• Management of business resources: During the business requirement analysis phase and there is a lot of clarifications and optimizations involved. This stage requires a lot of business involvement. The incumbent is expected to drive these sessions, pre-agree on timelines with contributing resources and bring them to closure within the project timelines. These businesses resources are involved in many other business projects and BAU issues. The incumbent must have solid experience of navigating complex project structure, entangle dependencies and prioritize to still be able to deliver. 
• Another biggest area of this project is testing. Golden Rule is that there must never be any regression nor any repudiation from subscribers. This project must and will be seamless from subscriber point of view.
There will be a lot of testing involved, both at technical and business level. The PM is expected to track ALL of this to make sure nothing planned is missed. Again, this will involve a number of systems and multiple business units.
• Lastly the Cutover itself. Big Day and high pressure. The PM must therefore be structured and must be able to handle high pressure situations.
• On top of all this, the PM will be expected to handle properly the normal project administration side.
Documentation, Risk Management, Acceptance, Payment, etc.
• Determine and define project scope and objectives.
• Predict resources needed to reach objectives and manage resources in an effective and efficient manner. 
• Support budget preparation based on scope of work and resource requirements.
• Track project costs in order to meet budget.
• Develop and manage a detailed project schedule and work plan.
• Provide project updates on a consistent basis to various stakeholders about strategy, adjustments, and progress.
• Manage contracts with vendors and suppliers by assigning tasks and communicating expected deliverables. 
• Ensure risks are identified early and both mitigation and contingency actions are defined and followed through.
• Utilize industry best practices, techniques, and standards throughout entire project execution. 
• Monitor progress and make adjustments as needed.
• Measure project performance to identify areas for improvement.

Minimum Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, business, or a related field
• 5-8 years of project management and related experience
• Project Management Professional (PMP) certification preferred
• Proven track record in leading complex Mobile Telecommunications Projects
• Proven ability to solve problems creatively.
• Strong familiarity with project management software tool, methodologies, and best practices
• Experience seeing projects through the full life cycle.
• Excellent analytical skills
• Strong interpersonal skills and extremely resourceful
• Proven ability to complete projects according to outlined scope, budget, and timeline.