Software Project Management Specialist (Banking/Fintech)

Profile summary:

Project Management Specialist’ is to be an organized, detail-oriented individual managing software projects from start to finish, designing action plans to increase productivity, manage project costs, and keep projects on schedule for completion; managing and motivating software developers, other team members, and engaging with customers, to keep project goals coordinated and to get projects completed; and ultimately answers to management/PMO.

Role and Responsibilities:

‘Project Management Specialist’ plans, organize, monitors one or more projects to meet defined requirements; and collaborates with development, testing, incident management, and customer facing teams to guide efforts for delivering defined project outputs on time, within budget, and at required quality; with customer centricity. Key Role Responsibilities includes:

• Manages project goals and priorities, as jointly determined with management/PMO, and may be responsible for one or more projects; and negotiates the assignment of activities with team members and their reporting managers, in a matrix organization
• Provides performance inputs, for the team members, to functional/administrative managers; and supports for identifying professional development for each team member and coach them to clarify assignments and deliverables; & mentor others in project management practices.
• Co-creates a project initiation plan with the team, and organizes the work into manageable activity clusters (phases); compiles the estimates for a project; and prepares project plans and monitors and reports project progress as per defined templates
• Performs monitoring and reporting on project progress to meet plan, quality, cost, schedule and resource optimization requisites. Tracks project milestones for forecasting and alerting for invoicing.
• Performs risks management (Identifies risks and creates risk mitigation plans); & ensure reporting, analyses, and pro-active identification of any variance; determines when to escalate issues to appropriate management levels and mitigate risks, as needed.
• Collaborates with other project management practitioners, and with Solutions/Technical Architects and Product Engineering. Manages relationships with project stakeholders, and keeps them informed of progress, and issues; & manages delivery of project requisites and expectations
• Performs project documentation and updates to relevant knowledge bases;
• Ensures implementation of PMO guidelines, in alignment to Agile/SDLC practices and the build and release management requisites
• Proactively identify changes in work scope and ensure appropriate planning measures are taken to reassess and amend the scope of work requirement, budget, and timeline, if/as needed
• Resolves day to day issues related to client relations, project quality, project risk and project management, and seeks timely support pro-actively where needed
• Provides status reporting regarding project milestones, deliverable, dependencies, risks and issues, communicating across leadership.
• Works creatively and analytically in a problem-solving environment demonstrating teamwork, innovation and excellence.
• Prepares estimates and detailed project plans for all phases of the project. & Manage project scope and changes. & Monitors ongoing quality control and participate in quality issue resolutions
• Evaluates the projects on completion, analyse the challenges (and undertakes root cause analysis, if/as needed) that occurred during the execution of the project and conduct project closure activities to formalize and communicate the project acceptance, along with handover documentation. & support incidence management and other ongoing activities, as applicable
• Leverages problem solving skills and periodically assess improvement opportunities in the workflows, and articulates and presents process innovations and continual improvements opportunities to decision makers

General Requirements:

• B. Tech/B. E. in Computer Science or IT, or equivalent in similar related field, from an institute of repute; & with typically 2 to 4 years of relevant work experience. Postgraduates in relevant field preferred. Combination of education and experience, may be considered in lieu.
• Understanding of Agile Scrum, Agile SAFe, PMP, ITIL, and/or Lean-IT, is preferred
• Demonstrable aptitude for project management skills including time and risk management; & Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Demonstrable results orientation with focus on product quality, time to market
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, including negotiation, presentation, and influence skills
• Exposure to SDLC, Agile methodologies, DevOps, Continuous Integration, Software Configuration Management systems & associated tools
• Aptitude for actively coaching and mentoring team members
• Understand interdependencies between technology, operations and business needs.
• Flexible both in mindset and readiness to work a variety of working hours; and be able to work under pressure and time-pressing deadlines
• Knowledge of fintech and the products like UPI, BBPS, IMPS, etc. is strongly preferred