Program Manager job description

Project management — Program Manager
Coordinates related projects toward shared benefits and outcomes.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Project Planning
- Project Scope Definition — You can spot a scope statement that will not survive delivery, because it hides an open decision or an unfunded deliverable, and get it rewritten before the plan is baselined.
- Work Breakdown Structure Development — You can review another project manager's breakdown, point to the gaps, overlaps and packages too large to track, and show them how to restructure it.
- Schedule Building and Critical Path Analysis — You can recover a slipped schedule by re-sequencing, overlapping work or cutting scope, and present each option with its cost and risk before one is chosen.
- Resource Planning and Allocation — You can balance shared specialists across several projects, and make the trade-off visible to sponsors when two projects need the same person at the same time.
- Project Budgeting and Cost Control — You can control the budget of a program of related projects, move funds between them within your authority, and explain every forecast change to finance.

Delivery Control
- Project Status Reporting — You can roll status from several projects into one report a steering group can act on, and challenge a green rating the evidence does not support.
- Milestone and Progress Tracking — You can track progress across related projects with shared milestones, and spot when one project's slip will make another miss its date.
- Change Control and Scope Management — You can manage changes that cut across several projects or contracts, and negotiate the trade-off when a sponsor wants more without more time or money.
- Delivery Methodology Selection — You can tailor the approach mid-project when conditions change, such as moving part of the work to iterative delivery, without losing control of scope and budget.
- Project Meeting and Workshop Facilitation — You can facilitate a difficult session, such as a re-plan after a major slip, and keep it on decisions rather than blame.
- Project Closure and Lessons Learned — You can close a project early when it no longer makes sense, and make sure its lessons change how the next project is planned.

Risk & Governance
- Project Risk and Issue Management — You can manage risks that span several projects or suppliers, and make sure contingency is held where the risk actually sits.
- Cross-Project Dependency Mapping — You can map dependencies across a program, find the ones that could stall several projects at once, and change the plan to reduce them.
- Project Governance and Stage Gates — You can design governance for a program that is proportionate to its risk, and recommend stopping a project at a gate when its case has gone.
- Supplier and Contractor Delivery Management — You can manage several suppliers whose work depends on each other, and settle disputes about who is responsible for a delay.
- Deliverable Acceptance and Sign-Off — You can set up acceptance for deliverables with several approvers or an external customer, so sign-off is not held hostage to unrelated issues.

Stakeholders & Teams
- Sponsor and Steering Committee Engagement — You can work with a sponsor group whose members disagree, and still get a decision the project can act on.
- Project Team Mobilisation — You can mobilise several teams for a program at once, and re-form a team that has lost its shape after a major change.
- Business Change and Adoption Planning — You can plan adoption for a change that affects several departments, and adjust the plan when resistance or low uptake shows up.

Portfolio & PMO
- Benefits Realisation Management — You can track benefits across a program after delivery, and report honestly when they are not arriving.
- Portfolio Prioritisation and Capacity Balancing — You can balance a program's work against available capacity, and recommend pausing or stopping a project to protect the others.
- PMO Standards and Tooling — You can design the standards and tooling for a program or department, and keep them light enough that teams actually use them.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can keep several people's work in step across teams, agree priorities and hand-offs with them, and keep one shared task list that all of them actually use.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate work that spans several teams, name the assumptions behind each figure, and rework the plan when those assumptions break.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, taking the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can set how quality is checked on complex work shared by several teams, and you spot the problems that only appear where their pieces meet.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can solve problems in areas where you are not the expert, and your solutions hold up on cost, time, and the effort needed to keep them working.
- Domain Expertise — You can bring in good practice from outside the organisation and make it work here, and your judgement clearly improves the work you touch.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to a shared understanding, and colleagues come to you for help framing a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Writing & Documentation — You can own the documents behind a large piece of work, coordinating contributions so that people who were never involved can carry it on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can hold senior and external relationships, negotiate between competing demands, and deliver unwelcome news without losing trust.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can lead across team boundaries, build the credibility that makes people follow you by choice, and create room for others to lead.
- Mentoring — You can develop other mentors, coach people through career decisions rather than tasks, and lift the capability of a whole team.
- Strategic Thinking — You can set direction for an area, choose deliberately what not to do, and defend that choice when it is challenged.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- Project Management Professional (PMP) (required from Senior Project Manager)