Publicis Sapient - Program/Project Manager

Domain: Program Management

Job Purpose

- Lead the overall delivery setup and execution, people and financials management for the assigned software services projects/ program work streams in order to realize defined business outcomes with mid-sized, globally distributed teams

- Partner with Agile leads, other delivery leads, clients and other internal/ external stakeholders to drive effective adoption of best practices, deployment of processes, methodologies and tools, execution of ceremonies and to drive continuous improvement on delivery engagements

- Contribute to pre-sales and works with the legal and operations teams to ensure compliance

- Manage relationships & status reporting within the organization, with clients & applicable third parties

- Manage internal and external dependencies for the project or program

- People management responsibilities for team members, track leads, scrum masters and product owners

- Participate in Delivery Management and (or) Agile communities

- The Scrum Master is trained on practicing Scrum and helps a team adopt Scrum in order to deliver quality releases quickly to market

- Expertise with various Agile Methodologies - Scrum, Scrum with XP, Kanban, and Scrum ban etc.

- Expertise with various Agile Tools - Jira, Xplanner, Confluence, RTC, TFS, Rally etc. and ensuring adoption in consistent manner.

- Act as servant leader and shield the team from external interference and distractions to keep it in group flow

- Create self-organizing teams, build consensus and resolve conflict

- Responsible for the team to follow processes, establish and actively facilitate the cadence of all scrum ceremonies, and remove team impediments or escalate as per defined SLAs

- Ability to partner with product owner and manage backlog - backlog prioritization, backlog grooming, ready groomed stories for next 3 iterations

- Responsible for Definition of Done, Definition of Ready, Sprint Dashboard, Burn down Charts, QA Metrics (Quality/Technical Debt; Cycle Time/Lead Time), Story Quality Metrics, Escalation Plan, Sprint Start and Closure activities, Team working Agreement, push for Automation, Story Estimation techniques (like planning poker) etc.

- Ability to manage and increase team velocity, measure efficiency at team and individual level

- Articulate the overall project risk and risk mitigation plan and make it transparent to the relevant stakeholders

- Good to have functional understanding of project and business value being delivered

- Keeps scrum artifacts updated and visible

- Knowledge of engineering best practices (XP, Refactoring, Clean code patterns, CI/CD - DevOps, TDD/BDD/DDD, Trunk based development)

Mandatory Skills & Experience

- Over 3 years of experience as the lead project manager for full lifecycle delivery of mid-sized (>6 months in schedule and >600 person days in effort) software services projects or programs with globally distributed teams

- Strong - hands on- project management experience from inception to closure phases

- Experience with 2 or more engagements as a lead (scrum master, product owner, Kanban lead, etc.) on delivery or consulting projects/ programs based on Scrum/ Kanban framework

- Experience of delivering one or more fixed time, fixed price or SLA based managed services engagements

- Over 2 years of lead experience in a direct client facing role (preferably in the US or UK) as part of a consulting/ services organization

- Knowledge of 2 or more effort and cost estimation methodologies/ frameworks

- Direct people management responsibilities for 5 or more people (including track leads/ other leads) and indirect responsibility/ span of 15 or more people as part of a cross functional team comprising of business analysts. Creative designers, developers, testers and other support functions

- Strong commercial acumen i.e. understanding of pricing models, delivery P&L, budgeting, etc. Basic level understanding of contracts

- Industry experience on Retail, Financial Services, Energy & commodities, Travel & Hospitality, Automotive, Consumer products is preferred.

Nice to have Experience & Credentials

- Diverse experience across more than one service offering such as application development and maintenance, application/ product support, systems integration, product engineering, package implementation, project management consulting, etc.

- Practitioner experience as an Agile Coach

- Delivery experience with scaled agile engagements

- Certifications: SAFe or other scaled agile related certifications

About US

Publicis Sapient is a digital transformation partner helping established organizations get to their future, digitally-enabled state, both in the way they work and the way they serve their customers. We help unlock value through a start-up mindset and modern methods, fusing strategy, consulting and customer experience with agile engineering and problem-solving creativity. As digital pioneers with 20,000 people and 53 offices around the globe, our experience spanning technology, data sciences, consulting and customer obsession - combined with our culture of curiosity and relentlessness - enables us to accelerate our clients- businesses through designing the products and services their customers truly value. Publicis Sapient is the digital business transformation hub of Publicis Groupe