Project Manager, Principal - Agile

JOB DESCRIPTION

Your Role

The Marketing and Digital Program Management Office is seeking a Principal Agile Project Manager to manage and drive delivery of strategic and operational initiatives. This position supports the Marketing and Digital Portfolio and will report to the Director, Project Management Office. Initiatives are complex and delivered using Agile practices with people, process, technology, and multiple stakeholder impacts. Proven history of delivering complex implementations in digital and data disciplines is required.

The Agile Principal Project Manager acts as a technical and business initiative leader. This role partners with the technical and business drivers and product owners/managers to deliver required capabilities (business value), including management of schedule, scope, IT and business resources, financials, benefit tracking, and issue/risk identification and mitigation to ensure successful completion of initiatives. This role is the single point of accountability for delivery and status within an assigned initiative or product area, including matrix management of business teams, systems, digital, data, infrastructure, and multiple vendor delivery teams. The Agile Principal Project Manager partners with multiple delivery portfolios and product teams to drive initiative-based activities to achieve required business value. Accountable for developing, managing, and monitoring estimates, budget, forecasts, and accruals, this role is also responsible for managing and maintaining Jira records and dashboards throughout delivery and representing and advocating for delivery team during intake and quarterly delivery planning.

The Agile Principal Project Manager provides direct management of schedule, sprint planning issues/risks, budget, and resources, managing initiatives of $10M+ or larger. With the Owner and Driver, you will define initiative/product delivery governance, product, and Agile team structure. This role makes sure epics are created in Jira, manages updates and dependencies within initiatives, and documents and maps enabling epics. The Agile Principal Project Manager tracks initiative and product capability, and delivery against major milestones, business outcomes, and quarterly key metrics. This role defines, implements, and facilitates change management, ensures compliance, and business and operational readiness. This role works with Scrum Master(s) to make sure initiative communication is effective and Agile practices are followed (e.g., Daily Stand Ups, Demos, Retrospectives). Communication competency is key as you will lead and facilitate initiative meetings and executive and senior leadership briefings and demos.

The Agile Principal Project Manager may directly manage or perform duties as a Project Manager, Product Manager, and/or Scrum Master on an initiative. Accountable for monitoring the teams' work and completion progress in PlanView, this role may also perform matrix management for initiative and product staff.

Your Work

In this role, you will:

• Operate at a strategic technical & business level to ensure initiatives are in line with Blue Shield of California strategic goals
• Communicate with all levels, including senior management, to report status, drive progress, identify and manage risks and interdependencies, and influence decision-making
• Independently and effectively maneuver through organizational dynamics and tailor approach to ensure optimal outcome
• Determine key technical and business issues, developing and monitoring product roadmaps, documenting and driving action plans, and implementing delivery of business value
• Evaluate trade-offs between initiative size and complexity, cost, urgency, risk, and stakeholder value
• Understand and manage Development Value Streams, dev ops and delivery in cloud environments
• Obtain technical estimates, develop business plans, manage accruals, and validate financial forecasts
• Manage on-going reconciliation of resources and other related initiative or product expenditures in PlanView
• Facilitate all operational readiness (business, technical and operational) activities throughout the lifecycle of initiatives including change management activities to support readiness
• Accountable for independently defining, managing, and coordinating delivery across business, systems, digital, data and infrastructure teams and vendors
• Manage agile/scrum cross-functional teams and implementing agile methodologies within an IT organization
• Deliver initiatives using Agile methodologies, SAFe preferred

QUALIFICATIONS

Your Knowledge & Experience

• Requires a bachelor's degree or equivalent experience, master's degree preferred
• Requires at least 10 years of prior relevant experience, including project, product, and/or program management experience, with budget accountability
• Requires 5 years of experience in delivering Agile initiatives and programs
• Requires 10 years of Agile, Waterfall, and/or hybrid SDLC delivery experience
• Expertise in PlanView, Jira, Confluence, Microsoft Project, or similar project management tools
• Business and technology project/program management experience
• Experience delivering complex data warehouse and analytics initiatives, data as a service experience is a plus
• Executive level communications and ability to synthesize and communicate information is required
• Information technology/technical background experience, including complex technical project management
• Demonstrated leadership on large-scale enterprise-wide projects ($10M+ budgets)
• Knowledge of Blue Shield of California (BSC) or prior healthcare payer experience preferred
• Scrum Master certification (CSM) strongly preferred
• Project Management Institute (PMI) or Project Management Professional (PMP) strongly preferred
• SAFe Practice Consultant (SPC) certification preferred

Pay Range:
The pay range for this role is: $ 136400.00 to $ 204600.00 for California.

Note:
Please note that this range represents the pay range for this and many other positions at Blue Shield that fall into this pay grade. Blue Shield salaries are based on a variety of factors, including the candidate's experience, location (California, Bay area, or outside California), and current employee salaries for similar roles.