Sr. Project Manager - Asset Management - Soho Square Solutions
Baltimore, MD
About the Job
*Only local candidates in and around Baltimore, MD will be shortlisted.
Job Description
The Senior Project Manager is required to work within the Investments business predominantly supporting Investments Trading and/or Enablement initiatives managing across multiple business and technology teams across the front and back offices. This involves working closely with the Investments leadership to conduct analysis, have a deep understanding of the business, their priorities and represent them in key discussions and provide transparency on all related projects.
The Project Manager will require a good understanding of an Asset Management firm's front office, have proven experience in conducting and producing quality analysis and delivering projects across Investments. The person will also need excellent communication skills, be detailed oriented, very hands on and have experience of leading activities, working collaboratively and producing quality deliverables.
PRINCIPAL RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Actively build SME across key Investments businesses, processes, and systems to effectively represent Investments in a variety of projects to influence, hold to account and provide transparency.
- Lead collaborative partnerships and dialog across multiple business units and functions.
- Actively promote alignment and compliance with related programs and projects across Legal, Compliance and the wider firm
- Demonstrate management expertise and exercise influence to identify, evaluate, and recommend current/potential projects to ensure access to accurate information for consumption by clients, regulators, and other critical stakeholders.
- Develop the strategy for managing the timeline and budget consisting of multiple, concurrent projects with multiple deliverables and components across a multi-year period, in conjunction with the business sponsor and other stakeholders.
- Proactively collaborate with the sponsors to identify, approve, and prioritize all projects and deliverables throughout the lifecycle of the program.
- Build excellent working relationships with teams as required.
- Lead and facilitate project discussions and meetings, ensuring they are task oriented, and objective driven to ensure the efficient use of everyone's time who are involved.
- Partner with business sponsors to define success metrics and criteria.
- Facilitate all operational checkpoint activities throughout the lifecycle of projects.
- Assess and resolve all high priority project risks as they are encountered.
- Escalate risks and issues to the investment leadership as appropriate.
- Manage project according to established methodology, standards, and enterprise change policy
- Continually update relevant business stakeholders of project status and publish project status reports as and when required.
- Represent the project in various project governance and inter-department forums.
- Define and track project milestones while developing, maintaining, and reporting on an overall and integrated delivery plan.
- Ensure the project meets success parameters and business objectives.
- Responsible for planning and strategizing across the projects in scope to ensure adequate resourcing, financial impacts, interdependencies, and roadmaps for strategy planning. Translate roadmaps into actionable interrelated plans.
- Develop the program schedule consisting of the components, the order in which they must be executed, the amount of time required for each, and the major program level milestones
- Work collaboratively, with business and technology teams and stakeholders, to conduct analysis and produce detailed project artifacts including requirements documents, process maps and flows, testing artifacts and other documentation as required.
- Business Requirements: Lead requirements gathering session, document detailed functional requirements, obtain signoff on requirements, and ensure traceability of requirements to ensure solution meets requirements.
- Process, procedure, and playbook development: Lead walkthroughs for complex front, middle and back-office processes, document current and future state process flows and obtain signoff from business partners, develop context flows as needed to illustrate requested changes, assist the business in development of related procedures and playbooks as needed.
- Demonstrated Competencies:
- Involves the key players in identifying operating needs, issues, and solutions. Proposes plans that are aligned with business objectives and requirements. Takes and leads actions to enhance business function standards and performance with the participation of business and technical partners.
- Establishes and maintains networks and alliances. Shares information and readily determines who to go to for relevant information. Seeks assistance and feedback in the problem-solving process. Partners with others to achieve expectations.
- Participates in change programs by planning implementation activities with other change champions. Interprets the meaning of new strategic directions for the work group and sets objectives and standards. Implements monitoring and feedback systems. Evaluates progress and finds ways of making continuous improvements. Solicits and offers ideas for improving primary business processes. Improves effectiveness and efficiency through the involvement of peers and business partners by initiating new approaches.
- Utilizes a variety of information and data sources pertaining to organizational and professional trends. Checks the source for omission and accuracy. Identifies the sources that are appropriate for specific types of information. Checks for bias and omission. Seeks out the appropriate people to approach for guidance either formally or informally depending on the type of issue. Links information in a lateral as well as linear manner. Finds hidden data. Relates and manipulates data from various sources to create a fuller picture. Investigates and uncovers root causes of a problem or issue.
- Converses with, writes reports and creates/delivers presentations to all levels of colleagues and peer groups in ways that support problem solving and planning. Seeks a consensus with business partners. Debates opinions, tests understanding and clarifies judgments. Brings conflict into the open empathetically. Explains the context of multiple inter-related situations, asks searching, probing questions, and solicits expert advice prior to taking action and making recommendations.
- Understands and seeks ways to improve the quality and results of one's work. Ensures that team roles and responsibilities are defined and clearly communicated, and that the quality of the work efforts is meeting expectations. Procures resources (people, funding, material, support) to ensure that the unit's work is produced in a prompt, quality manner. Provides input for strategic planning meetings so that they produce expected outcomes. Plans for allocation of resources in line with unit goals. Creates and implements a strategy for supporting current and future business needs.
- Takes steps to identify and improve processes within own functional area. May escalate process improvement recommendations to appropriate management team for consideration. Participates on process improvement teams as subject matter expert for assigned areas of responsibilities.
- Evaluates the effectiveness of current metrics in pursuit of improved performance indicators. Seeks opportunities and takes actions to enhance personal and functional performance and meet consistently more challenging expectations.
- Identifies potential areas of conflicting priorities and vulnerability in achieving standards. Reviews department's progress against established goals, objectives, service level targets and project milestones. Supports others in achieving deliverables by efficiently allocating resources and providing common organizing systems, techniques, and disciplines. Maintains a proactive work review and approval process prior to assignment completion. Solicits internal and external customer evaluation of performance and devises measures for improvement.
PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES / SKILLS / QUALIFICATIONS:
Required:
- 8+ years Asset Management experience.
- 8+ years of Project Management experience.
- 4+ years Front Office Investment Management project delivery experience.
- Worked closely with Portfolio Managers, Portfolio Analysts, and other members of an Investment Manager's front office in a project manager capacity.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
- Excellent critical thinking skills and ability to collaborate with people across multiple locations.
- Experience facilitating meetings with stakeholders to review and solve key issues.
- Well organized and self-motivated.
- Ability to collaborate well with people with varying technical, business, and cultural backgrounds.
- Experience working with senior management in formal presentations, escalations, and issue resolutions.
- Experience managing senior sponsors 4 years minimum.
- Strong negotiation and influencing skills.
- Experience with Microsoft Project, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and Visio
- Ability to translate and simplify complex business and technical concepts.
- Ability to collaborate well with people with varying technical, business, and cultural backgrounds.
- Ability to manage multiple medium and large projects.
- High level of analytical and problem-solving skills.
- Excellent Microsoft Project, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio, and SharePoint skills.
Preferred:
- Excellent presentation skills. Likely to have a project management qualification (PMP, Prince II etc.).
Source : Soho Square Solutions
