Senior IT Project Manager

Join the hundreds of talented and innovative team members who are making an impact every day at one of the most iconic media brands in the nation. Whether you love to tell compelling stories or want to drive our award-winning powerhouse in new directions, the Los Angeles Times team is the place to be.

Job Description Summary

The Sr Project Manager (PM) role will be responsible for leading project teams to deliver project(s) that span across multiple business units. The Sr. PM role will be a liaison between business, IT and several vendors that are part of an engagement. This person will be creating comprehensive project plans, managing cross functional resources, scope, interdependencies, timeline, and budget for these plans. This also includes management of issues, risks, and change requests (CR) to ensure successful, in-budget and on-time project delivery and transition to Application Support and our Helpdesk. Contribute to process improvement and automation initiatives as it relates to improving project delivery.

Job Description

Responsibilities:

• Project manage timelines for new tool solutions, feature requests, operational reporting, and backlog requests to ensure agreed-upon timelines and milestones are met.
• Closely support business and technology teams by keeping them honest to the identified scope and timeline.
• Develop detailed project plans for multiple work tracks, build a centralized tracker to log issues, open items, and risks .
• Ensure all deadlines are met and all handoffs are successful as the project is moving through the pipeline.
• Assess, communicate, and mitigate risk, utilizing contingency plans as necessary and manage through issue resolution.
• Provide on-site leadership for project team by building and motivating team members to meet project goals, adhering to their responsibilities and project milestones.
• Communicate both detailed and high-level progress to stakeholders at large including executives.
• Create and maintain documentation including project plans, templates, executive summaries, and retrospectives.
• Build processes to track success metrics by engaging in strategic thinking to visualize and achieve long-term wins and efficiencies.
• Lead regular meetings with many cross-functional stakeholders keeping points on track to achieve optimal discussions and drive decision making.
• Keep a close eye on the budget for all the work tracks and alert when any task/activity takes longer than estimated time and falls on the critical path.
• Responsible for updating project plans from either vendor updates or vendor plans.
• Coordinate and Manage RFPs from different vendors, by doing due diligence on the scope, cost benefit analysis and provide summary to leadership; manage requirements of a Change Order.
• Provide end-to-end project management and take full ownership of project lifecycle.
• Learn about company’s various business departments and be pivotal to driving solutions.
• Manage multiple projects.
• Report on project success criteria results, metrics, test, and deployment management activities.
• Deliver projects on time ensuring quality and technical standards are met.
• Provide status reporting regarding project milestones, deliverable, dependencies, risks and issues, communicating across leadership.
• Work on Change Management and Communication Plan; and detailed cutover plan for Go-Live; highlighting all the owners and dependencies.
• Perform other duties (including but not limited to multiple projects) as assigned.

Qualifications:

• 8-10 years of progressive experience scoping and managing functional and infrastructure projects within a Consulting or Media or Entertainment firm in a program/project manager role.
• Proficiency in MS Office tools, such as creating/managing a project plan using MS Project with tasks and activities going up to 7 levels and 5000+ lines using advanced constraints and dependencies, writing Macros and complex lookup formulas in MS Excel, creating 3D charts, PowerPoint decks for Executive Reporting, and Jira for managing development user stories, bugs, fixes, and test results.
• Experience in managing primary and secondary data center move to Microsoft Azure or AWS cloud services is strongly preferred.
• Workday or other HRIS knowledge is preferred.
• Salesforce or other CRM and Marketing application knowledge is preferred.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations or other ERP knowledge is preferred.
• Experience creating Logical Data Model, process flows/maps using DrawIO, MS Visio, or other design tools.
• Skilled at leading project teams in either an Agile or Waterfall workflow environment.
• Experience working with and managing offshore/near-shore resources.
• Ability to do Fit-Gap analysis by identifying existing systems and technologies and documenting enhancement requirements.
• Experience working with business stakeholders, executive management and all levels of management to understand business needs, gather requirements and develop functional and business requirements and work flows by creating Project Charter, Business Requirements Document (BRD) and Functional Requirement Specifications (FRS).
• Strong background and experience in organizing User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and ability to develop test plan templates and help coordinate resolution of issues found during manual and/or automated testing.
• Experience in developing training plans and coordinating training for business users.
• Excellent relationship-building and people skills, with an ability to develop strong and trustworthy relationships across multiple teams and end-users.
• Strong organizational and problem-solving skills, even in ambiguous environments, as well as an attention to detail.
• Calm, measured approach to high volume of work.
• Effective presentation, written and verbal communication and negotiation skills when dealing directly with clients.
• Logical thinking and creative problem-solving ability.
• Possesses a personal affinity for the products of The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union Tribune.
• Must be able to work cooperatively and adaptively in a team setting.
• Must be able to work under pressure, multitask and produce high quality work in a deadline driven environment.
• Must be able to sit and/or stand for periods of up to 8-10 hours.
• Must have valid driver’s license and be able to drive; if necessary.
• Must be able to travel domestically, if required.
• Must be able to handle up to 30 pounds of equipment.

Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Business (Marketing, Product Management, etc.) is required.
• PMP Certification is a plus.

Thank you for your interest in joining our team at the Los Angeles Times! We look forward to reviewing your application.