Project Manager – Operations Change
For this top tier investment bank we are looking for a VP level project manager to join the operations team providing middle and back-office support across multiple asset classes, covering Equity, Financing, Fixed Income, FX and Syndicate products across all geographies. It supports global client trade processing teams of approximately 900 people. The teams are aligned by global functional leads by product.
The team delivers business process, project management, and technology-based solutions for operations and for the wider client's divisions. This team is engaged with all aspects of the trade life cycle, from booking through to final cash management. The team also has a broad responsibility across different product groups for ensuring that changes to systems and processes are managed appropriately and safely.
The candidate should be an individual who has a solid understanding of process re-engineering and a strong project management discipline. This individual must have exceptional interpersonal and organisational skills, be able to plan and manage multiple projects simultaneously, feel comfortable communicating with all levels of staff and have a history of consistently executing against plan. The successful candidate will also help develop solutions for mitigating identified risks/issues and/or improving efficiency. A solid basic understanding of the sales and trading business and operational processes is a key prerequisite.
ROLE DESCRIPTION:
This role will require the candidate to take on a variety of project delivery roles within the Financing space, focusing on meeting industry and regulatory initiative deadlines; improving the efficiency of daily processing; managing and improving the service delivery of IT services (production service management); and delivery of improvements to the infrastructure processes from initial concept; requirements analysis; verification validation; through to transition to the business. This individual will work with stakeholders across the operations, projects, and IT teams to clearly understand the business issues behind each type of request; to analyse requirements for change; to deliver these changes through their lifecycle (including testing and managing change as they are rolled out); to provide reporting and analysis of delivery during the life cycle; to support users of the service; and to provide analysis of service success by managing key service performance indicators.
Project Management:
- Project manage and deliver various Financing initiatives, many of which are industry and/or regulatory initiatives with rigid delivery dates
- Collaborate with the EMEA Financing teams to refine the future state vision for processing and translate business objectives requirements into a program of renovation initiatives.
- Work with the stakeholders to prioritize work and drive milestones
- Capture the benefits case for proposed changes
- Manage work plan development, requirements collection, client and IT expectations, issues, risks and scope changes throughout all phases of the project
- Track and communicate project status to team and management
- Develop comprehensive and robust test cases/plans and co-coordinating the execution of these tests to ensure successful delivery of regular global technology releases
- Coordinate user training manage any hand-offs to formal training organization
- Work across other teams to develop best practice methodologies and approaches for business analysis, for delivery of technology, and process solutions to business problems.
Leadership:
- Strong communication and influencing skills
- Strong sense of ownership and accountability for work and people
- Capable of setting direction and motivating teams
- Direct management of the existing team
- Understanding the products and processes and identify deficiencies or improvement opportunities; recommend best practices based on prior experiences.
Relationship Management:
- Interact with client managers to define project objectives and priorities within the scope of the project/program/initiative
- Develop relationships with the stakeholders in order to understand their priorities and meet the needs of the business
- Develop strong relationships with technology and operations teams primarily in New York, London and Budapest, to design, develop and implement technology platforms and business process improvements
- Interface with stakeholders, sponsors and other Senior Management to confirm program/project sponsorship/support, strategic alignment, and report progress, achievements, significant issues and risks.
- Review and validate business rules and requirements and obtain all required sign-offs
- Design future state process flows, incorporating requirements and obtain client validation
- Work with IT to translate business requirements into future state system specifications
- Act as liaison/agent between IT and stakeholder for requirements and assumptions clarification or validation, compromise or agreement mediation, and to close information gaps
Skills Required
- Proven Project Management Experience: a project manager who has led all steps of the project management life cycle. Managed either single large-scale investment projects or multiple concurrent smaller change initiatives.
- Financial Discipline: has created business cases including cost/benefit and ROI. Formally managed project financials: plan vs. actual vs. forecast. Demonstrated large-scale cost reduction.
- Analytical skills: critically evaluates information gathered from multiple sources, reconcile variances, and convey into high level presentations for senior management and key stakeholders
- Stakeholder Management: can negotiate priorities with senior stakeholders, build cross divisional relationships, gain support for solutions
- Communication Skills: can build relationships at all levels in the organisation, flexes communication method and style based on audience, can articulate key messages succinctly and effectively.
- Flexibility: exhibit flexibility of thought and a willingness to engage in a wide range of issues at all levels of detail.
Skills Desired
- Line experience e.g. in a client-service group, settlements team, or team dealing with trade completion is an advantage. High degree of understanding of the life cycle of a trade.
- Competent in Microsoft Projects, Visio, Excel, Word and PowerPoint
- Background in Management Consulting would also be suitable.
- Background in software delivery is desirable.
- Project Management Software is desirable.
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