Senior Project Manager

ICT Programme Manager –Information Technology – Dublin 3 sites & Mayo

Contact 6 – 12 months

Background: following the departure of the Head of Information Systems at the end of March 2019, a Programme Manager is required to make the relay from the current Head of Information systems to the future Head of Information systems, and to sustain progress on multiple projects during the intervening period.

Day to day operations management is catered by the team and a member of the management committee, and the programme manager will have to liaise with these common resources to progress on projects without compromising operations.

On-going main projects are a redesign of the website and the configuration and deployment of public and private wi-fi across the sites + many software and infrastructure projects of different scale and status of advancement.

Technical environment is made of VmWare and Microsoft environment and products, with Apple computers in 2 departments (Graphic Design and Photography) and some legacy Linux systems.

Responsibilities of the onsite ICT Programme Manager:

• 6 months period, 5 days (7.5 hours effective per day minimum) a week, with the possibility of adding 3-6 months.
• Run regular meetings with ICT Staff and onsite contractor to identify difficulties and find solutions so as to progress business plan.
• Ensure projects move along, with an emphasis on removing and minimise lags from suppliers or other departments.
• Analyse the workload of internal resources and prioritise with ICT staff and Head of departments the different projects.
• Interface regularly with head of departments on progress of the different projects, manage new demands, analysing where they fit in terms of priorities compared to existing.
• Coordinate interventions from different suppliers, in particular Infrastructure consultants and DB/Web Development consultants.
• Transfer knowledge from current Head of Information Systems re systems, historical choices and transfer back on closing of contract to new Head of Information Systems.
• Provide specifications and advice in managing (capital & current) expenditure in coordination with relevant ICT budget holder.
• Consolidate organisational knowledge (FAQs, documentation of procedures and policies)
• Mentor staff if need be during projects under remit.
• Participate to make or buy decisions.
• Advice on decisions re outsourcing, while managing knowledge transfer, documentation and training.
• Manage crisis if need be.
• Other responsibilities as dictated by the director.

Highly desirable skills:

• Experience in programme management (management of multiple simultaneous and coherent suite of projects)
• Excellent analytical skills.
• Understand technically clients, servers, Database, Application Front-ends, enterprise architecture and infrastructure, virtualisation, WAN, security, CRM (MS Dynamics), Intranet (Sharepoint), website (Kentico or .NET based).
• Understanding (and ideally strong experience) of the constraints in which the public sector operates (procurement, FOI, Data protection…)
• Ideally comes from a data modelling, systems analysis and software development background.
• Knowledge of project management methodologies (Prince2, PMI, Agile) while being able to adapt to constraints. Being light on administration/controls except when it really matters.
• Soft skills are important. Positive can-do attitude tempered by the ability to say no.
• Being able to communicate with technical staff and with non-technical managers and staff.
• Able to understand business requirements and translate into operable solutions under tight resource constraints.
• Supplier management experience.
• Multi-site experience
• Stay calm and collected under pressure.
• Able to hit the floor running.

Desirable:

• Able to help out with hands-on tasks if need be (especially around MS SQL Server, MS Access, Sharepoint Development, .NET, Dynamics CRM…)

Availability: As soon as possible, able to provide some of the time during March if at all possible for knowledge transfer.