Senior Program Manager - BFS

Purpose of your role :

The vacancy is for a highly motivated Programme Manager who will be responsible for end to end delivery of software products (systems, applications and platforms) for use by FIL's Finance professionals. We define a program as an initiative that enables the value delivery across different stakeholders in a transparent way through structured approach.

The Finance Technology function delivers highly complex global initiatives for our FIL's CFO organisation. The programme manager is responsible for delivery of such initiatives that span technology deliverables leveraging multiple teams in a matrix environment, ensuring project objectives are met within agreed parameters of scope, time, cost and quality.

The right candidate will provide thought leadership

- Financial services experience required

- Tier 1 MBA required

- Create and maintain a program plan in line with business strategy & objectives, including the total cost of ownership

- Build credibility and influence business and technology stakeholders to steer the project to successful outcomes

- Facilitate clear communication and collaboration

- Understand the CFO landscape, as well as FIL's business and industry

- Understand modern programming and testing constructs and be able to leverage the best methodology for the product(s)

- Lead, develop and work with a high performing, self-organised & cross functional team

Key Responsibilities :

Program Management :

- Create and maintain end-to-end program plan for a product/platform or set of products and enable delivery of business value across multiple stakeholders, and many upstream and downstream dependencies.

- Ensuring the project journey is transparent, metrics-driven and all stakeholders are aligned at all times - in decision making

- Extremely good at dependency, issue and risk management with an eye for detail - raise the profile, seek assistance from stakeholders as required, as well as overall scope.

- Able to make as well as influence quick decision making - and keeping project team and all upstream, downstream stakeholders and sponsors honest. Strong ability to prioritise, distill fact and what is important from noise.

- Extremely seasoned in organising / socialising information - projecting complex messaging in and highly structured way, with a deep understanding of the detail paired with a clear thought process.

- Able to quickly grasp and work efficiently in a complex ecosystem - of multiple programmes with intersecting milestones, a large number of decision points, in a product based environment, and leadership is often more by influence / richness of content over hard reporting lines.

- Ability to understand the detail of tech and take decisions - from architecture to infrastructure to delivery to testing.

- Form cross-functional team, and help drive target operating model, end-to-end architecture, solution detailing, dependency integration, acceptance testing, and implementation strategy.

- Establish governance structure and manage resources, cost and communication.

- Deliver features with high test automation and ensure deployments into production on demand and independent of interfacing products

- Work collaboratively with other product/program managers and keep business stakeholders sufficiently involved during delivery of features.

- Develop real time and shared information delivery mechanisms like build radiators, dashboards and health metrics. Run product working groups and steering committees and influence Investment decisions based on current and future direction.

- Monitor the delivery metrics to spot trends and take appropriate actions in the spirit of relentless pursuit of quality

People :

- Create a product team comprising of poly-skilled people with ability to work across different technology stacks

- Foster a culture whereby team members are empowered to make decisions in the best interest of the product and willingly take high personal accountability for their decisions & actions

- Guide the team such that they embrace the constructs of a high-performing, self-organising team - ensuring team goals take precedence over individual goals

- Facilitate intelligent risk taking and use every mistake as a team learning opportunity. Encourage people to think out of the box and challenge norms smartly without diluting quality and controls in the production environment

- Continuously communicate within the team to ensure clear visibility and understanding of their individual roles and growth aspirations. Connect them with other appropriate opportunities within the team, department or the wider organisation.

- Lead by example and earn the respect of your team - use principles from - servant-leader- concept.

- Be the senior counsel in the department and contribute materially into other departmental and organisational initiatives

Experience and Qualifications :

- Overall 12-15 years- experience with at least 5+ year experience in software delivery & programme management, handling large teams including 3rd Party - leading complex projects and products.

- Strong leadership and communication skills and the ability to teach and learn from others

- Previous success working with an agile development team. Good knowledge of industry standard project management methodologies

- Ability to differentiate between project and product goals and deliver to both

- Ability to work collaboratively with others and navigate complex decision making

- Experience in delivering and maintaining products (including 3rd party) with cross geography team is a plus

- Experience of tools like Atlassian suite, Pivotal Tracker, Basecamp etc. is desired.

- Experience / Background with Corporate Finance concepts and relevant industry terminology is desired

- Operate largely independently, with minimal guidance and monitoring. Proven ability to work well under pressure and in a team environment

- Good communication, influencing & negotiation skills. Self-motivated, flexible, responsible, and a penchant for quality