Workday Senior Project Manager at Alight Solutions

Title: Workday Senior Project Manager – USA Virtual/ Work from Home (WFH)

Our story

At Alight, we believe a company s success starts with its people. It s why we re so driven to connect passion with purpose. Our team s expertise in human insights and cloud technology, allows companies and employees around the world to transform and thrive.

With a competitive total rewards package, continuing education and training, and tremendous potential with a growing global organization, Alight is the perfect place to put your passion to work.

Join our team. Because transformation takes a workforce.

The Workday Senior Project Manager will be directly responsible for overseeing all stages of the project and project delivery. The responsibilities include assembling project teams, assigning individual responsibilities and enforcing accountability, developing and maintaining a budget and schedule to ensure timely completion of project, maintaining standard project management documentation and metrics with limited direction, working directly with internal and external client counterparts, other project leads, and ongoing operations to deliver successful implementation, and managing the scope of the project. The Workday Senior Project Manager will also be responsible for promoting team engagement and building and maintaining a successful relationship with the client .

Manage Project Scope and Delivery

• Leads a larger LE project, Tenant Assessment, Mergers & Acquisitions or multiple ME projects.
• Could act as a lead PM over seeing PM(s) on a client deal.
• Participates in sales opportunities and process.
• Considered a coach or buddy for PMs.
• Leads building the practice initiatives.
• PM SME on WD and Alight methodology.
• Could be a people manager.
• Manages Workday implementations through all life cycles stages.
• Work with the Client PM to develop the project plan and project charter, including procedures for managing Actions, Risks and Issues throughout the project.
• Communicate Project Plan: ensure a common understanding by setting expectations regarding the project plan to align the stakeholders and team members. Implement approved actions and workarounds to mitigate project risks in order to minimize the impact on the project.
• Execute Project Plan: execute the tasks as defined in the project plan in order to achieve the project goals.
• Monitor and Control Project Work: measure project performance using appropriate tools and techniques to monitor and report on the progress of the project against plan and budget, identify and quantify variances, perform required corrective actions, and communicate to all stakeholders.
• Manage Project Scope: manage changes to the project scope, schedule, roles & responsibilities and costs using appropriate verification techniques to keep the project plan accurate, updated, and reflective of authorized changes as defined in the change control procedures; facilitate customer acceptance.
• Ensure any sign-offs required for the project (e.g. stage and/or milestone sign-offs, design sign-offs, Change Order sign-offs etc.) are obtained in a timely manner.
• Close Contractual Obligations: Formalize final acceptance for the project from the sponsor/customer by ensuring that the delivered product(s) and services comply with the agreed deliverables lists, scope, and any organizational procedures. Ensure end of project survey is sent to the client as well as performed a lesson learned session.
• Communicates: Provides information to others both internal and external to the organization; represents the organization to customers and other external sources.
• Partnership with Workday: liaise with Workday in terms of the project status updates, Delivery Assurance Checkpoints, product gap reporting and other processes as defined in Workday Deployment Methodology. Set up and maintain Customer Scorecard in the Partner Centre, manage creation and access to Client s tenants including Customer Central.

Align and Manage Resources and Budget

• Execute Resource Allocation Plan: manage resource allocation proactively by ensuring that appropriate resources and tools are assigned according to the project plan.
• Celebrate, either formally or informally, the accomplishment of goals.
• Engage Others: introduce the Alight project team members to the project. Manage, guide and motivate the Alight project team. Set clear vision, expectations and milestones for the project. Facilitate and enable effective teamwork and collaboration.
• Manage Client billing: with support from a Project Coordinator, ensure that any time spent on the project work gets reported against the right project codes and charged to the client (unless agreed otherwise with the Engagement Executive).
• Monitor and manage project budget and margin, take corrective actions when required.

Contribute to Practice Building

• Contributes to knowledge management capital through activities such as sharing documented lessons learned, and documented deliverables
• Leads internal practice building initiatives.
• Understands quality standards for own work and monitors and manages work of team members, providing feedback as appropriate.
• Follow Alight Workday Deployment Methodology, suggest improvements and proactively address issues.

Ensure Customer Success

• Client Relationship: establishes and maintains client relationships. Communicates feedback to leadership as appropriate.
• Client Success: in conjunction with project s Lead Consultants, plan and execute adequate Knowledge Transfer (within SOW scope) to the Client so they can be self-sufficient in administering Workday post go-live. Identify opportunities to introduce the Customer to Alight AMS offering and other services that may be beneficial for the Customer. If the AMS service is purchased, ensure timely completion of handover from the Project to the AMS team.
• Measure Customer Satisfaction: measure customer satisfaction at the end of the project by capturing customer feedback using appropriate techniques to gain, maintain, and improve customer long-term relationships.

Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, and Experience

Knowledge, Education, Certification, Skills & Technical Proficiencies

Required

• Bachelors degree in Business, Math, Computer Science, or Finance or equivalent work experience
• Proficiency with MS Project
• Proficiency in MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Visio
• Ability to recognize personal skills, abilities, limitations and strengths, taking appropriate action to pursue developmental activities to strengthen skills and experience
• Ability to work in a fast-paced multinational environment and to adapt to frequent change
• Excellent oral and written communications skills
• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills
• Commercial acumen understanding what drives project revenue and profitability. Ability to effectively manage project budgets and forecasting to maximize revenue and profitability.
• Excellent understanding and effective application of project management processes and techniques including planning, progress tracking, risk and issue management frameworks, change control frameworks, sign-off procedures
• Can demonstrate examples of recommending and executing process or methodology improvements
• If not already certified, must successfully pass Workday HCM and/or Financials Core and PM training classes and retain Workday certification

Preferred

• Strong communication skills with all levels of the organization – both internal and external
• Strong interpersonal skills to support team building
• Ability to advocate a creative atmosphere, facilitate entrepreneurial meetings, and envision a final product and overall market acceptance early in the design and/or development process
• Ability to develop cooperative relationships to achieve results through a win-win relationship
• Ability to establish alliances with other departments and organizations by recognizing dependencies
• Ability to transfer own knowledge to more junior colleagues and coach others
• Ability to provide best practice advice to help clients put in place an effective project structure and governance framework
• Ability to modify project deployment approach to cater for client-specific requirements and constraints in a way that also caters for Alight business needs as well as Workday Delivery Assurance requirements
• General understanding of Workday s functionality (different modules and high-level dependencies) as well as implementation tools
• Awareness of cultural diversity and can embrace and capitalize those differences; applies knowledge in decision-making process
• Project planning/scheduling and budgeting skills
• Ability to identify project risks by defining risk strategies and developing the risk management plan
• Participates as part of a team, understanding the various work styles of others and their roles on the team. Demonstrates enthusiasm and commitment to the goals and objectives of the team. Seeks help from other team members as appropriate
• Ability to represent the company and department in a positive and professional manner
• Embraces entrepreneurial spirit in work through recognizing and capitalizing on opportunities to improve the organization
• Project Management certification (PMP or PRINCE2 Practitioner) is beneficial but not required

Work Experience

• 5 to 7 + years previous program/project management experience required including scope and requirements definition, problem-solving and process improvements in current Internet-based technology environment
• Experience of successfully leading a large project implementation of Workday, PeopleSoft, Oracle, SAP or similar applications
• Experience leading and participating in technical and cross-functional projects
• Experience of managing large project teams and stakeholder groups
• Previous functional/technical HCM, Payroll and Financials deployment experience either as an internal consultant or with a consulting/software organization
• Experience of communicating effectively with high levels of management internally and on the client-side