Senior Project Manager

Job description / Role

Job purpose

Responsible for the planning, execution, and delivery of a software development or systems integration project. Responsible for directing and supervising project development in accordance with the requirements of the client. In charge of managing and tracking scope, schedule, costs, and quality on a day-to-day basis for large-sized projects. A senior project leader should be able to identify issues, detect unstated assumptions, resolve interpersonal conflicts, as well as use systematic management skills. This position usually requires 10–13 years of relevant experience.

Requirements

• Understand and verify the functional requirements of the software.
• Understand the non-functional requirements of the software.
• Agree with systems analyst on the different methodologies of requirements gathering and analysis.
• Determine the existence of any conflicts within the requirements of the software.
• Ensure the commitment of the development team to the requirements.
• Refer to the requirements’ owner in case any changes are needed in the requirements due to technical issues to ensure that the change has no negative impacts on the customer from the business perspective.
• Perform risk assessment on the requirements.
• Agree with systems analyst on requirements priorities and dependencies.
• Validate the requirements to ensure stakeholders' needs and expectations; for example, prototypes could be used.
• Ensure proper understanding and review of requirements document by stakeholders.
• Ensure proper understanding of change requests by stakeholders and communicate with client when needed.
• Responsible for defining and controlling the scope of the project.

• Own the project deliverables, i.e., requirements specs, design document, schedule, code, etc.
• Review unit test cases and make sure the developers’ understanding of the requirements is correct.
• Ensure that the product integration procedure follows the established project schedule and acceptance criteria defined in the testing plan.

• Review design and design document to ensure its compliance with the client requirements and internal systems.
• Review make-buy-reuse analysis (DAR).
• Conduct meetings with graphics team to arrange for the requested graphic design job and verify output with requirements.

• Has a direct impact on customer retention through on-time high-quality project delivery.
• Manage the relationship between project cost and deliverables to maximize delivered customer value.
• Add customer value through understanding customer business domain and nature.

• Implement re-estimates if the project’s requirements are changed due to incompletion, ambiguity, etc.
• Receive a change request from the client, document the issues and ensure clear understanding with the client of the change request (CR) through meetings, emails, etc.
• Meet with Change Control Board (CCB) defined in the project plan document to evaluate the change request issue(s), to determine feasibility and impact on the project.
• Perform sizing for change request according to its requirements.
• Identify risks that would affect the external commitments with the client.
• Send the CR effort estimate to the SDM and EM to review, then to the client for approval before proceeding with implementation.

• Identify project team structure and allocate needed resources.
• Review project plans, activities, and work products (project plans, prototype, test cases, QE measurement reports, project code, user manual and guide, etc.) for their consistency with requirements of the project.
• Update project plans and work products resulting from changes or additions to the requirements’ baseline.
• Track the progress of the project through updating project plans and schedule regularly.
• Make use of DAR process for resolving issues faced in the project.
• Track the status of testing activities through the reports submitted by QE and through meetings between them.
• Update task status on Changepoint.
• Hold closure meeting with all team members and stakeholders to discuss and analyze what went right or wrong, and to produce final views, reports, and lessons learnt.
• Update CV at project closure.
• Ensure that team members update their skills and CV with the skills learnt in the project.

• Select the suitable development, testing, and deployment environments for the project.
• Verify that the building environment is ready.
• Review project baselines.
• Review packages/documents to be delivered.

• Identify the communication plan to cover both internal and external communications.
• Schedule regular meetings/emails to communicate the project status to the project team, and plan for upcoming project tasks defined in schedule.
• Communicate with different parties (i.e., graphic designer, technical writing) to complete project.
• Report status of the project and the work products to client, engagement manager, and service delivery manager regularly.
• Communicate with the SDM through meetings or emails to review the external commitments.
• Communicate with the EM the external delivery milestone schedule to be reviewed and approved.
• Communicate with EM or SDM any change requests’ impact on cost, estimate, and schedule.

• Identify, develop, and analyse project risks and create plans for integrating them.
• Continuously follow-up on risk management plan to ensure it is up to date.
• Perform risk assessment on the requirements.
• Regularly add project risks during project execution.
• Manage risk of estimate overruns due to change requests.

• Determine the work involved in the project, and organize it into phases, milestones, and tasks.
• Establish the project structure; work breakdown structure, then define task priorities and dependencies.
• Ensure that the critical path in the project schedule is identified to highlight risks.
• Monitor and update weekly project schedule and scheduled tasks.
• Abide by project schedule.
• Responsible for updating the project schedule whenever there are new commitments or changes to existing commitments.

• Identify metrics that will be used to monitor project objectives and sub-processes performance.
• Analyse and track bug count, closure rate, and rejection rate.
• Measure project cost/effort weekly (actual vs. estimate).
• Measure project time weekly (actual vs. estimate).
• Check the defect density metric from QPM tool to analyse the data and meet with team members to identify the problem root cause and define the appropriate action items.
• Identify triggers and actions needed to be taken on identifying problems based on measurements.

• Plan for periodical functional audits to assure work product consistency with requirements and changes.
• Plan for peer reviews and review activities according to project milestones defined in the project schedule.
• Responsible for reviewing and assigning bugs to different team members and checking the root cause for different types of defects.
• Responsible for following up on bug closure.

• Request adequate human resources and hardware/other resources to achieve project completion.
• Ensure team motivation to achieve required project deadlines and complete deliverables.
• Conduct performance evaluations for the team members of the project.