Project Manager

About Us

We are looking for a skilled and passionate Project Manager to work within our Portfolio & Governance department within Springer Nature Technology, reporting to the Director of Portfolio & Project Office. We aim to enable value acceleration across the Springer Nature portfolios for our business and our customers while ensuring a healthy and future-proof technical ecosystem - all at maximum quality and minimum risk.

You will be joining a distributed cross-functional team with different nationalities, backgrounds and experience levels. All team members collaborate to deliver optimal results for our customers, our business and our colleagues, and we are working to create a culture that encourages new ideas and innovation but within the boundaries of the company guidelines that best suit the vision and strategy that Springer Nature has defined.

We are an equal opportunities employer. We work in a relaxed, friendly environment and offer the flexibility to work from home 3 days a week.

About You

You are a proactive, curious person who provides a calm outlook to those around you. You are willing to probe, question and investigate difficulties as they arise.

You will have:

• An existing track record of planning, delivering, and monitoring successful projects and programmes of work as a Programme Manager or significant contribution to complex programmes as a Project Manager or equivalent

• An understanding of the full project lifecycle from proposal to delivery and beyond

• Experience of working with or in a PMO team

• Experience of managing the Discovery phase of projects

• Experience preparing and presenting project proposals/business cases for Senior Management approval

• Effective leadership, interpersonal and communication skills

• A broad understanding of agile methodologies or frameworks and other industry standard project management tools

• Experience facilitating teams in gathering and presenting information to clearly communicate technical context to non technical stakeholders

• The ability to be super-organised with the ability to juggle multiple priorities and switch context very quickly

• Strong collaboration with multi-discipline project teams of various sizes including Developers, UX Designers, Project managers, Business Analysts, and QA

• Experience finding creative approaches to problem-solving with the ability to focus on details while maintaining the “big picture” view

• The capability to work with teams and abstract information to translate upstream. And ensure that the team's voices and challenges are heard and escalated

• The ability to work with a sponsor to set up a piece of work, focus them on building an outcome and defining clearly requirements and constraints.

• Excellent oral and written communications skills in English language and experience interacting with both business and IT individuals at all levels of the organisation

• Ability to navigate the complexities of an international corporate organisation

Additionally, you might have some or all of:

• An understanding of complexity and systems thinking

• A proven ability to make progress and find a place to start in the face of ambiguity

• An understanding of change management

• Knowledge of technical processes / technical organisation structures and operating models

• Experience using OKRs or similar frameworks to help teams define strategic objectives

About the role

We are setting up a discovery team in our Portfolio & Governance Office in SN Technology to address the incoming demand and requests for change and transformation. The discovery team will be a cross-functional team dedicated to understanding the problem space and context of new demand, prepare a clear discovery brief and guide the process from this initial preparation, into discovery and eventually necessary stage gates and approvals for initiation of a project or product development process.  As part of this team you will be:

• Overseeing the Discovery phase of a project lifecycle and ensuring that all relevant steps in our stage gate process are prepared and all required project information is captured for Senior Management approval and eventual transition to delivery .

• Coordinating teams to ensure that new demand is properly influxed into Springer Nature Technology’s (SNT) pipeline – working with stakeholders and SNT teams to:

  • Analyse the demand and surrounding context

  • Support the generation of business/financial cases or investment requests

  • Prioritise work based on defined criteria

  • Identify and document key benefits (qualitative and quantitative)

  • Carry out an impact analysis and assessing trade-offs for decision making

  • Scenario planning – comparing potential options for delivering and making recommendations

• Preparing clear information, documentation and presentations for submission to decision-making stakeholders/boards

• Working with teams and stakeholders to ensure project-level OKRs and appropriate planning are in place and teams are aligned and working towards them

• Creating up to date artefacts that communicate, roadmaps, progress, risk, and opportunities at an appropriate level

• Raising and address risks and issues to the programme and work with the appropriate teams or individuals to mitigate them

• Enabling teams to reach decisions quickly and effectively and understand dependencies within and outside the programme

• Providing support and guidance to colleagues e.g. project managers and BAs

• Working effectively with 3rd parties as needed to deliver required outcomes

• Working with various teams to abstract information and translate upstream, ensuring that the teams voices and challenges are heard and escalated.

• Working with sponsors to set up a piece of work, focus them on building an outcome and defining clearly requirements and constraints.

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