Program Manager

Role Overview

The Program Manager is responsible for leading and coordinating a portfolio of IT projects within the financial services domain, ensuring alignment with business objectives, regulatory requirements, and technology strategy. The role oversees multiple projects, provides governance, drives delivery excellence, and ensures that all projects meet scope, schedule, budget, and quality expectations. Deep domain knowledge in General Insurance and Motor Insurance is required to lead and oversee multiple concurrent projects.

Key Responsibilities

Program Leadership and Governance

• Lead a multi-project program consisting of several concurrent IT projects in insurance or financial technology domains.
• Must have hands-on experience managing application development projects
• Establish program governance frameworks, reporting structures, and delivery standards.
• Ensure compliance with financial services regulatory requirements such as AML, PCI-DSS, and MAS/BNM guidelines.

Planning and Delivery Management

• Develop and maintain integrated program plans including timelines, dependencies, resources, risks, and budgets.
• Monitor project progress and drive corrective actions to address issues, delays, or deviations.
• Coordinate cross-functional teams including business analysts, developers, QA, infrastructure, security, and vendors.
• Facilitate decision-making across stakeholders and escalate critical issues when required.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Act as the primary point of contact for senior leadership and business sponsors.
• Present program status, dashboards, financial updates, and risk assessments.
• Build strong relationships with business units, operations teams, compliance, technology leads, and vendors.

Risk, Compliance and Quality Assurance

• Identify, assess, and manage program-level risks, dependencies, and constraints.
• Ensure deliverables comply with internal policies, cybersecurity standards, and regulatory expectations.
• Conduct program reviews, retrospectives, and continuous improvement initiatives.

Financial and Resource Management

• Manage program budget planning, forecasting, and cost control.
• Optimize resource allocation across projects.
• Support procurement and vendor management including contract negotiation and performance evaluation.

Qualifications and Requirements

Education and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in IT, Computer Science, Business, or related fields. Master’s degree is an advantage.
• Minimum 10 years of experience in IT project or program management.
• At least 5 years of experience in General and/or Motor Insurance domains.
• Experience in financial services (banking, insurance, fintech, payments) is required

Technical and Domain Skills

• Strong understanding of SDLC methodologies such as Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, and Hybrid.
• Knowledge of financial systems including core banking, digital channels, risk systems, or payment platforms.
• Familiarity with regulatory frameworks and cybersecurity standards in financial services.

Preferred Certifications

• PMP, PgMP, or PRINCE2
• Agile certifications such as CSM, SAFe, or PMI-ACP
• ITIL Foundation

Soft Skills

• Strong leadership and people management capabilities.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• High analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making ability.
• Ability to work in a demanding, fast-paced environment.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

• On-time, on-budget, and in-scope program delivery.
• Stakeholder satisfaction and realization of business value.
• Regulatory and audit compliance.
• Team performance and engagement.
• Effective risk mitigation and issue resolution.

Added Advantage

Modern Architecture and Engineering Concepts

• Understanding of microservices, APIs, and integration patterns.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, including migration strategies.
• Knowledge of containerization and orchestration tools such as Docker, Kubernetes, or OpenShift.
• Awareness of DevOps practices including CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code.
• Knowledge of application performance, scalability, and resilience concepts.
• Experience working with modern and legacy programming stacks including Java, .NET, COBOL, and mainframe.

Legacy Systems and Transformation

• Understanding of monolithic architectures and technical debt.
• Experience with data migration, schema changes, and modernization of integration layers.
• Ability to work with SMEs to define modernization paths and phased migrations.

Strategic Planning for Modernization

• Ability to define multi-year modernization roadmaps.
• Experience leading large-scale application modernization or digital transformation programs.
• Skills in managing dependencies, sequencing workloads, and planning phased rollouts.
• Capability to handle risks around legacy instability, cutover planning, and downtime avoidance.
• Ability to facilitate cross-team coordination through Scrum-of-Scrums, dependency mapping, and synchronized sprint planning.