Director of Project Management - New Orleans, United States - Tulane University Staff

    Default job background
    Description
    The Director of Project Management is responsible for planning, implementing, and ensuring the timely delivery of university-wide project initiatives. The Director will create and manage budgets and complex business plans related to project development and implementation. The Director will ensure that well-established project management methodologies are utilized and adopted during the entire project lifecycle.

    The Director of Project Management works closely with the Director of Change Management to ensure that strategies, methods, and processes from these two core pillars (Project management and Change Management) are aligned to maximize project effectiveness and achieve user adoption.

    Furthermore, the Director of Project Management will partner with colleagues in administrative and academic functions to create opportunities for these colleagues to learn and deploy effective project management methodologies.


    • The Director will manage and develop PM staff. They will lead a diverse team of professional, technical, support staff, and contractors, both directly and indirectly.

    Ability to:

    o Identify and deploy organization-wide best practices for project delivery in planning (strategy to execution) and requirements (outcomes and benefits).

    o Create detailed project plans, monitor and report on progress including, milestones and dependencies.

    o Ensure that project plans minimize disruption of delivery of services; identify, diagnose, optimize use of resources, and resolve bottlenecks and other sub-optimal activity.

    o Develop and document complex business processes and workflows.

    o Analyze business processes and workflow to drive efficiencies and identify innovation that technology enhancements may provide.

    o Assess the impact of project risks and deviations in time, budgets, and resources.

    The director will need to be a problem solver and use proper judgment to escalate potential issues to appropriate stakeholders to mitigate risk.

    o Identify and develop trusted adviser relationship with project and program stakeholders, sponsors and university stakeholders.


    • Knowledge of Agile Development practices and environments.
    • Understanding of Quality Assurance (QA) plans for testing.
    • People management skills in leading and developing a team of project manager professionals.
    • Ability to establish project management best practices, templates, policies, tools and partnerships to expand and mature the project management capabilities at Tulane.
    • Coaching on Project Management (PM) skills for leadership development and to help departments adopt PM best practices.
    • Ability to coordinate planning with outside service vendors, assist clients with planning functional improvements, and act as a liaison between clients and vendors.
    • Contributes to vendor selection and engagements.
    • A broad understanding of ERP/best of breed systems from both a functional and technical perspective.
    • Effective in engaging others in developing innovative solutions to important, highly complex strategic and operating problems in which cross-department and divisional considerations are often present.
    • Demonstrated conflict resolution skills.
    • Excellent interpersonal skills; ability to effectively build, manage and maintain excellent working relationships with senior project sponsors and internal and external business partners.
    • Excellent oral and written communication skills.
    • Excellent organizational and time management skills; ability to effectively manage multiple projects simultaneously, and consistently meet established deadlines. Effective in providing briefings to supervisor on project status and escalating issues to supervisor as appropriate in a timely fashion.
    • Excellent analytical, strategic thinking, and problem-solving skills with an ability to comprehensively plan, execute, and evaluate project effectiveness.
    • Works independently and as a member of a team.
    • Perform other duties as assigned to assist the department in maintaining its mission and deliver required services.
    • Bachelor's Degree in a Business-related field and five years project management experience to include strategic planning experience
    • Project Management (PM) Certification
    • Master Project Manager or relevant experience managing complex projects in a higher education setting
    • R1 University Administrative systems experience
    • ERP systems (Oracle Cloud) implementation experience
    • Knowledge of tools to assist with scrum team planning (e.g. Jira) and PM tools (e.g. MS Project)
    • Process improvement, such as Lean or Six Sigma