The Project Lead is a strategic professional who stays abreast of developments within own field and contributes to directional strategy by considering their application in own job and the business. Recognized technical authority for an area within the business. Requires basic commercial awareness. There are typically multiple people within the business that provide the same level of subject matter expertise. Developed communication and diplomacy skills are required in order to guide, influence and convince others, in particular colleagues in other areas and occasional external customers. Significant impact on the area through complex deliverables. Provides advice and counsel related to the technology or operations of the business. Work impacts an entire area, which eventually affects the overall performance and effectiveness of the sub-function/job family.

Responsibilities:

• Manages teams in large multi-faceted project or multiple projects at the same time.
• Owns project goals leveraging expertise to inspire a sense of shared purpose within the project team.
• Organizes new challenges and drive business results.
• Uses best practice PMO methodology to create a project plan to fit the stakeholders/customers’ needs and deliver within budget on desired outcomes.
• Drives end results of the project as a representative of the business.
• Prepares, maintains, and submits clear and concise activity/progress reports and time recording/management reports.
• Assesses project risk potentials and discover potential problems before they occur.
• Applies a proactive approach in routinely tracking the project participant progress against project goals.
• Defines, teaches, and enforces the use of good project management practices such as techniques in resolving complex, interdependent activities into tasks and sub-tasks that are documented, monitored and controlled.
• Identifies and where required amends the approach to the context and constraints of each project.
• Constantly improving their own and their teams' skills through lessons-learned reviews at project completion.
• Possess the knowledge, skills and experience to be able to recognize when problems surface or potential problems are looming.
• Articulates problems, bring the right people together to solve problems and know when the problem has been properly addressed and closed.
• Promotes partner involvement through effectively communicating project status upward and to the Client.
• Applies lessons learned from recent projects to future projects.
• Communicates to all concerned parties project milestones, status updates, as well as any existing or potential customer escalation issues.
• Proactively follows escalation and change control processes.
• Owns all management reports on a given engagement.
• Promotes good working relationships across a project, cultivating the people skills needed to develop trust and communication among all of a project's stakeholders: its sponsors, those who will make use of the project's results, those who command the resources needed, and the project team members.
• Appropriately assess risk when business decisions are made, demonstrating particular consideration for the firm's reputation and safeguarding Citigroup, its clients and assets, by driving compliance with applicable laws, rules and regulations, adhering to Policy, applying sound ethical judgment regarding personal behavior, conduct and business practices, and escalating, managing and reporting control issues with transparency.

Qualifications:

• Team management experience.
• 6-10 years of project management experience – preferably from a mortgage or financial services environment
• PMP certification strongly preferred, ITIL a plus.
• Ability to develop project plans, manage individual deadlines and goals.
• Knowledge of project metrics, including gathering, reporting, trend analysis, creation, and metrics.
• Ability to identify issues and problems, generate solutions and choose appropriate alternatives using basic root cause analysis.
• Manage project scope by assessing requirements changes, determining and conveying impact on budget, time and risk.
• Manage client expectations, anticipates operational and tactical risks and tracks them; clarify, identify, and track requirements and issues, remove barriers, resolve minor project issues and escalate to immediate manager where required.
• Proficient in MS Office applications,
• Stays abreast of current industry trends and new technology through professional associations, trade journals, networking, and associated training and seminars.

Education:

• Bachelor’s/University degree, Master’s degree preferred
• Full understanding of Fund Administration areas and experience in complex technical initiatives, innovative solutions addressing critical, large scale needs of the business.
• Ability to review, discuss, set direction for IT units to recognize the business needs appropriately to enable strategic development aligned with appropriate technology in line with modern market solutions.
• Experience if management over teams of Business Analysts and Developers.
• Leading the teams towards continuously strengthening standard of services.
• Ensuring effective reporting of the team’s work results.
• Active monitoring of market events promoting new technologies matching the profile of managed unit.
• Strategic development of the unit in cooperation with Operations, Technology, Product.
• Experience in Smart Tech/ Dev Ops platforms implementations (ETL, RPA, Other).
• Experience in cooperation with software manufacturers with regards to crafting business solutions, negotiations, result delivery assessment.
• Experience in challenging vendors to deliver 100% standard.
• Experience in analysis of system changes to large user populations.
• Experience in planning and coordinating new functionality and regression testing of the software components and functionalities.
• Proactive implementation of control processes to support operational risk mitigation.
• Self-dependent initiative and coordination of projects related to external and internal clients, strategy of the business
• Supporting the business with unusual/non-standard situations demanding broad operational knowledge and experience;
• Critical Thinking by logic and reasoning usage to identify the strengths and weaknesses of alternative solutions, conclusions or approaches to problems;
• Business analysis.
• Monitoring of projects status; reporting the status to senior management;
• Analysis, identification and reporting of gaps and risks within the processes;
• Active cooperation with the internal clients’ sites and external clients with regards sharing best knowledge and implementing scalable solutions;
• Ability to recognize and interpret the impact of changes in IT world, on the business.
• Continuous monitoring of IT market trends and new technologies.
• Adhering to high standards of business correspondence;
• Adhering to requirements regarding quality of work;
• Acknowledging principles and values of organizational culture and applying them in everyday work activities..
• Due care over relationship building with the clients and senior management;
• Managing one’s own time and others;
• Advanced project management skills;
• Supporting skills development of other team members.
• Regular reporting of projects & initiatives progress, next steps, accomplishments or issues
• Proactive approach in all assigned tasks