Senior Engagement/Project Manager

We are seeking a Professional Services Project Manager to lead, control and manage Professional Services projects from initiation through delivery for complex client engagements. Builds and manages the relationship with key stakeholders customer, supplier and in Rackspace. Maintains commercial responsibility for the project whilst building relationships with the customer to identify new opportunities to help them with their business problems. Unites and provides direction to internal and external technical and non-technical teams in order to ensure that all targets and requirements are met. Delivers results ensuring technical projects are completed on schedule and within budget.

Key Accountabilities

• Engage Rackspace and client stakeholders in gathering and documenting requirements that solve a customers pain point or objectives through project outcomes and benefits realization.
• Manage project profitability, revenue, margins and utilization by pro-active forecasting and escalating any potential scope change / new revenue opportunities.
• Maintain commercial responsibility for the project whilst building relationships with the customer to identify new opportunities to help them with their business problems.
• Effectively manage resources whether directly or indirectly to achieve goals by enhancing trust and cooperation. Escalates any conflicting resource requirements that may affect delivery in a timely manner.
• Build and maintain a network of cross-functional technical resources within Rackspace and across any relative partnerships to allow for higher productivity, increased business, and rapid resolution of problems and escalations.
• Contribute to the refinement of the Rackspace Professional Services methodology.
• Provide FANATICAL EXPERIENCE by driving the value of Rackspace to both potential and existing Rackspace customers and internal sales teams alike. Ability to travel as required.

Project Management

• Effectively leads, drives and executes projects using Waterfall methodology in order to achieve outcomes that meet the customers success criteria.
• Works effectively and communicates strongly with remote teams.
• Responsible for the scope, planning, monitoring and execution of technical projects from initiation through delivery, ensuring they remain on schedule and within budget, cost and quality tolerances.
• Effectively communicates upwards to management and stakeholders as well as downwards to project team resources. Completes and adheres to RACI and holds people to account for their responsibilities.
• Accountable for the preparation of key project documents (PID, plans, logs, reports) and other key deliverables through the life of the project.
• Proactively works to identify and manage project risks and issues. Ensures appropriate response plans are developed and executed.
• Effectively manages change to the project baseline by assessing project variance and evaluating impacts supported by the use of rigorous change control processes.
• Monitors the delivery of project deliverables from third parties inside and external to Rackspace and tracks progress of same through communication with project members.
• Prepares and presents accurate reports on project progress and problems to Rackspace and client stakeholders.

Pre-Sales Engagement

• Provides guidance for and assists with the creation of proposals, RFP/RFI responses, & Statements of Work (SoW). This includes the analysis and development of scope, duration, deliverables, resources, risk, assumptions and dependencies.
• Exhibits strong commercial acumen and calm gravitas when negotiating with customers or partners during contractual discussions
• Regularly collaborates with Sales pursuit teams, Programme & Project Managers, Technical Consultants, Solutions Architects, Partners, and extended cross-functional teams during presales and project delivery to ensure timely delivery and awareness of potential problems or risk requiring resolution or mitigation.

Expertise / Qualifications

• PMP/Prince2 (Practitioner) certification (minimum)
• Working knowledge/certification in one or more additional project management methodologies: PMP, PRINCE2, Foundation and Expert level certification in Azure / AWS/ GCP.
• Understanding of Agile mythologies and Principles
• 10+ Years of Project Management experience in successfully delivering Cloud Transformation Projects incl. DC Migrations, Applications Modernization, DevOps Transformation, and Software Development using cloud native technologies of AWS/AZURE/GCP.
• Technical conversational knowledge in the following areas: Cloud Migration Strategy and Methodology , Data centre strategy & operations, capacity, utilisation, performance backup, storage, disaster recovery, migration & consolidation, Applications Modernization, IT Service Management and Service Delivery.
• Should have relevant experience in managing Medium and large project / Program.
• Proven ability to organise and execute projects in a consistent, repeatable and reliable manner.
• Excellent time management, communications, decision making, presentation, human relations and organization skills.
• Able to resolve problems in a timely manner.
• Ability to communicate technical information and ideas so others will understand.
• Excellent all round knowledge of cloud technologies, IT operations, project management operations.
• Ability to adapt to a rapidly changing environment.
• Adept at handling shifting priorities and ambiguity.
• Enterprise level use of MS Office suite and knowledge of other project management tools (JIRA, Confluence, Trello etc)

Experience

• (essential) 7+ years project management experience in scoping, planning, leading and monitoring large scale, complex technical projects from initiation through delivery preferably in managed services or hosting.
• (essential) 5+ years working on technology projects including one or more of the following:
• Virtualisation technologies / cloud platforms.
• Application / platform migration.
• Data / storage / network migration and/or management.
• (desired) previous experience of directly managing other PMs / technical resources