Program/ Project Manager [SK-11689]
Skill · Chicago, IL · 3 wk ago
On-siteProject ManagementContract
About the Role
Join a leading organization at the forefront of innovation, dedicated to shaping the future of its industry. This company is known for its fast-paced environment and commitment to excellence, driving significant impact through strategic initiatives. As a Program/Project Manager, you will be the backbone of dynamic initiatives, transforming intricate plans into tangible results and ensuring every stakeholder has a clear view of progress. Your expertise will align cross-functional teams, drive accountability, and elevate the organization’s ability to deliver on its strategic goals.
Responsibilities
- Design, manage, and continuously improve the Agile operating model for the program, including sprint cadences, planning, and burndown tracking.
- Define sprint outputs and expectations, holding workstream owners accountable to delivery commitments.
- Build and maintain the program charter, roadmap, and sprint plans, adapting as priorities evolve.
- Manage and expand the central workstream structure across all program pillars, ensuring coverage, clarity, and ownership.
- Own and maintain the central work tracking system, including sprint boards, cross-workstream dashboards, and institution-level views.
- Serve as the system administrator for all project tooling, ensuring boards are current, accurate, and useful.
- Drive adoption of centralized execution systems across the team, migrating work away from ad hoc tracking.
- Maintain status dashboards for both core team and executive audiences.
- Schedule and facilitate the full operating rhythm: daily standups, weekly core working sessions, and biweekly executive meetings.
- Create and distribute agendas, pre-reads, and rolling meeting notes for all recurring sessions.
- Drive follow-up and accountability after every meeting, tracking open actions to closure.
- Identify and escalate blockers, risks, and dependencies proactively.
- Produce sprint reports including status summaries, burndown data, and workstream outputs.
- Build and distribute executive updates and email communications on a biweekly cadence.
- Maintain institution-level status trackers and consolidate completed, in-progress, and at-risk work into clear reporting.
- Translate day-to-day execution activity into leadership-ready visibility, ensuring executives always have an accurate picture of program health.
- Act as the connective tissue across all workstreams, aligning owners, tracking dependencies, and ensuring outputs are delivered on schedule.
- Coordinate across various digital channels to keep work integrated and on track.
- Facilitate alignment on shared priorities.
- Manage agency and vendor coordination: scheduling kickoffs, aligning timelines and attendees, and tracking execution readiness.
- Build and maintain centralized documentation repositories organized by workstream, ensuring materials are current, accessible, and version-controlled.
- Own the program’s central knowledge hub.
- Enforce documentation standards across the team: upload compliance, naming conventions, and visibility across functions.
- Consolidate incoming ideas, requests, and priorities from stakeholders into a structured backlog.
- Translate intake into actionable tasks and sprint backlog items, ensuring nothing gets lost or deprioritized without visibility.
- Partner with leadership to support prioritization decisions based on program goals and capacity.
- Provide hands-on project management support for individual workstreams as needed.
- Submit and track operational tickets and drive cross-functional resolution of blockers.
Requirements
- Bachelor’s degree in Business, Marketing, Communications, or a related field is preferred.
- 3–5 years of experience in program or project management, preferably in a digital marketing, agency, or cross-functional enterprise environment.
- Hands-on experience with Agile/Scrum methodologies, including sprint planning, backlog management, and burndown reporting.
- Demonstrated experience with a leading project management platform (e.g., Asana, Jira, Azure DevOps, Workfront, or similar).
- Experience managing executive-level reporting and preparing stakeholder communications or status updates.
- Proficiency in modern collaboration and office productivity suites (e.g., Microsoft 365 tools including Teams, Outlook, and PowerPoint).
- Ability to build and maintain project dashboards, trackers, and status reports.
- Comfort with ticketing and operational systems.
- Ability to quickly learn and become the administrator of new tools and platforms.
Nice-to-Have Qualifications
- Familiarity with digital marketing concepts, such as search engine optimization or content operations, is a plus, but not required.
Skills & Cultural Fit
- Exceptionally organized with a strong bias toward systems, structure, and documentation—you create order in complex environments.
- Strong project manager: you own timelines, track every open action, and close the loop without being asked.
- Proactive communicator who keeps stakeholders informed, surfaces issues early, and drives accountability without being heavy-handed.
- Highly collaborative with a team-first mindset—comfortable working across functions and seniority levels.
- Strong sense of urgency and ownership; you treat the program’s success as your own responsibility.
- Detail-oriented and reliable—teams and leaders trust that what you produce is accurate and complete.
- Comfortable operating in a fast-moving, ambiguous environment where priorities shift and speed matters.
- Willing to go above and beyond, and to roll up your sleeves for hands-on execution when the work calls for it.
What Success Looks Like
First 30-60 Days
- Take full ownership of the existing program infrastructure: sprint cadence, project management boards, meeting rhythm, and project status cadence.
- Build trust with workstream owners and leadership by delivering accurate, on-time reporting and maintaining a clear, up-to-date picture of program health.
- Begin identifying gaps and proposing improvements to the operating model.
Ongoing Key Performance Indicators
- Sprint delivery rate: percentage of committed sprint items completed on time.
- Reporting timeliness: executive updates and sprint summaries delivered on schedule.
- Backlog health: intake items triaged and on the board within agreed service level agreements.
- Cross-workstream alignment: dependencies tracked and risks escalated before they impact delivery.
- Dashboard accuracy: project management boards and status trackers reflect real-time program state.
Benefits
- Access to benefits such as health benefit contributions.
- Retirement plans with match.
- Flexible spending accounts.