Senior Project Leader

Mission Context

We are looking for a Senior Project Leader to ensure the operational management of a complex IT project in the HR domain, involving several institutions and numerous business and technical stakeholders.

Following a pre-study phase, the project is entering its initiation and implementation phase, with scope refinement, organizational structuring, and management of the various implementation phases up to the deployment of the solution.

Mission

As Project Leader, you are responsible for the operational management of the project, reporting to a Chain Project Leader and a Chain Service Manager. Together with them, you ensure the proper execution of the project and coordinate the various stakeholders and teams on a daily basis.

Your main responsibilities:

• Manage the scope, planning, development budget, development resources and their efficiency, risks, dependencies, and the quality of development.
• Establish budgets in collaboration with the Chain Project Leader;
• Set up schedules taking into account:
• Allocation of tasks/missions to collaborators;
• Workload;
• Priorities;
• Planned budgets;
• Quality expectations;
• Ensure project follow-up (quality, process/progress, costs);
• Ensure compliance with imposed quality standards and methodologies;
• Adjust planning according to changes in circumstances;
• Monitor the budget and timely report any potential overruns;
• Maintain daily contact with stakeholders regarding the progress of ongoing projects;
• Provide effective reporting;
• Discuss any issues with collaborators and the manager;
• Contribute to decision-making on whether or not to undertake a project;
• Proactively detect and report staffing needs for the team;
• Taking into account strategic objectives, define the operational objectives of the department, service, or section. Communicate these objectives and, in consultation with team members, define their individual objectives;
• Motivate the development team and strengthen team spirit: maintain daily contact with team members, be attentive to their needs and concerns, communicate relevant information from management to team members and vice versa, organize team activities...

Essential Skills

• Proven experience in managing complex IT projects, ideally in a .NET technical context;
• Mastery of the main dimensions of project management: scope, planning, budget, resources, risks, quality, and governance.
• Experience in managing projects involving multiple stakeholders with different interests and priorities.
• Ability to lead a decentralized project team, with members and expertise distributed across various organizations or stakeholders.
• Ability to transform a high-level scope into a concrete, structured, and manageable project organization.
• Ability to understand business challenges while having sufficient understanding of technical aspects, especially integrations and dependencies between systems.
• Team management skills:
• Properly inform team members (individually/collectively, through meetings and reports)
• Monitor the daily activities of team members
• Discuss issues
• Provide advice and explain new decisions
• Detect and report training needs to the business architect/analyst
• Assist the business architect/analyst in defining individual objectives
• Support new team members
• Ability to understand the content of deliverables and manage analyses:
• Examine business needs: analyze problems and study existing situations together with business owners
• Develop, in collaboration with functional analysts, analyses of data, processes and behaviors, schedules, and information analyses
• Present results
• Manage and propose improvements regarding quality, deadlines, and efficiency of the work to be carried out
• Experience with Agile methods and collaboration with multidisciplinary teams.
• Excellent communication, coordination, negotiation, and stakeholder management skills.
• Autonomous, structured, pragmatic, and results-oriented profile.
• Good working knowledge of French and Dutch.

Assets

• Experience with migration or integration projects of systems/applications.
• Ideally, the selected candidate has significant experience with projects conducted in a context of convergence between organizations (merger, acquisition with pooling of teams mastering different technologies) or technologies (phase-out of a mainframe, replacement of COBOL by .NET for example, and supporting skills development within teams);
• Experience in leading a .NET development team;
• Knowledge of standards, governance processes, basic tools such as Jira, Confluence;
• Having obtained a PRINCE2 certification or equivalent is an asset;
• Good knowledge of both main national languages is an important asset.

Profile sought: a Senior Project Leader capable of creating structure in a complex environment, bringing together stakeholders from different organizations, and maintaining the balance between business objectives, technical constraints, governance, and operational execution. Strong stakeholder management skills in a governmental or large enterprise context are a must.