Senior Project Manager job description

Project management — Senior Project Manager
Runs large or high-risk projects and coaches other project managers.

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 resolve over-allocation on your project by moving work, changing sequence or negotiating with line managers, before it causes a slip.
- Project Budgeting and Cost Control — You can build a project budget from the plan, including contingency, and forecast the final cost early enough for the sponsor to act on an overrun.

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 run a change process that keeps unapproved work out of the project, while still saying yes quickly to small changes that are clearly worth it.
- Delivery Methodology Selection — You can choose between a predictive, agile or hybrid approach for your project, and explain the choice from its risks, requirements and constraints.
- 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 run a lessons-learned review that names what actually went wrong and what to change, rather than a list of generalities.

Risk & Governance
- Project Risk and Issue Management — You can spot risks nobody has raised, size them by likelihood and impact, and escalate the ones that exceed the project's tolerance.
- Cross-Project Dependency Mapping — You can track dependencies in both directions and raise the alarm as soon as a delivery your project relies on starts to slip.
- Project Governance and Stage Gates — You can set up governance for a project, including decision points, approval limits and tolerances, and escalate as soon as a tolerance is forecast to be breached.
- Supplier and Contractor Delivery Management — You can hold a supplier to their contract when delivery slips, using the agreed remedies, while keeping the working relationship intact.
- Deliverable Acceptance and Sign-Off — You can handle a disputed acceptance by separating a real defect from a new requirement, and get the decision recorded.

Stakeholders & Teams
- Sponsor and Steering Committee Engagement — You can run a steering committee for your project so decisions are made in the meeting rather than deferred.
- Project Team Mobilisation — You can mobilise a team drawn from several departments or suppliers so everyone knows who decides what within the first weeks.
- Business Change and Adoption Planning — You can plan the training, communication and support that get users to adopt what the project delivers, and track whether they actually do.

Portfolio & PMO
- Benefits Realisation Management — You can record the measures and baselines for your project's benefits, and hand them to the owner who will track them after delivery.
- Portfolio Prioritisation and Capacity Balancing — You can supply the data a prioritisation decision needs for your project, such as cost, benefit, risk and the people it will take.
- PMO Standards and Tooling — You can improve a template or tool from how projects actually use it, and get other project managers to adopt the change.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can coordinate a small team's work on a shared goal: who does what by when, what has to wait for what, and a revised plan when things change.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate a whole project including its risks and unknowns, split it into stages, and defend the estimate when it is challenged.
- 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 be the person the team consults on your area, and you follow where the field is moving and apply it where it pays off.
- 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 win support for a proposal, reset expectations when the plan changes, and turn down a request with a reason the other side accepts.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can take charge of work with no clear owner, motivate people who do not report to you, and make calls others are willing to follow.
- Mentoring — You can mentor someone over months, tell them the uncomfortable thing they need to hear, and adapt how you teach to how they learn.
- Strategic Thinking — You can look a year ahead in your area, name what will matter by then, and turn that into work people can pick up now.

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