Senior Project Manager

Description:

The Panel is partnering with a leading FS company to appoint a Senior Project Manager within its payments function. In this role you will manage stakeholder engagement across business, technology and vendor teams, driving complex change from definition through to production, and bringing the confidence to challenge.

Not afraid to challenge people - you will test the thinking and ask the right questions rather than take it at face value.

Success in the role rests on three things above all: stakeholder engagement and management, banking experience, and genuine technical project management capability.

Roles and Responsibilities

1. Lead stakeholder engagement across business, technology, operations and vendor teams, facilitating workshops and decision forums and influencing at senior and executive level.
2. Take ownership of delivery for payments-related workstreams, managing scope, plan, budget, dependencies and RAID across multiple teams and third parties.
3. Partner with product owners, business analysts and architects to define, validate and prioritise requirements, constructively challenging solution and technical designs to ensure they stand up.
4. Coordinate integration and delivery across payment engines, core banking platforms, digital channels and supporting systems, managing cross-functional risks and dependencies.
5. Provide clear, regular status reporting to programme governance and senior stakeholders, and drive corrective action where delivery is off track.
6. Support test strategy, business acceptance, operational readiness and go-live, through to post-implementation stabilisation.

Experience Required

1. 10+ years delivering large-scale, complex change programmes, ideally within banking or wider financial services.
2. Demonstrable strength in stakeholder engagement and management up to executive level, with the credibility to challenge and align competing views.
3. A genuine technology and technical project management background, comfortable holding your own with architects and delivery teams.
4. Proven experience managing blended business and technology delivery, multiple vendors, and full project lifecycle in a regulated environment.
5. Experience of Agile delivery, alongside traditional methods.
6. PRINCE2, PMP or equivalent. Payments domain experience (SEPA, SWIFT, CHAPS, Faster Payments, cards and related schemes) is an advantage rather than essential.