Senior Project Manager (12 month FTC)

Xero is a beautiful, easy-to-use platform that helps small businesses and their accounting and bookkeeping advisors grow and thrive. 

At Xero, our purpose is to make life better for people in small business, their advisors, and communities around the world. This purpose sits at the centre of everything we do. We support our people to do the best work of their lives so that they can help small businesses succeed through better tools, information and connections. Because when they succeed they make a difference, and when millions of small businesses are making a difference, the world is a more beautiful place.

About the team

The Programs, Projects and Portfolio group exists to make sure that the people, processes, and priorities are in place to help Xero to operate as a world-class business and to lead the transformation of Xero into a modern delivery organisation. We deploy the best Portfolio, Programme, Project and Delivery practices to help teams deepen their customer intimacy and accelerate the delivery of value and ensure we have all of the practices in place to effectively prioritise, plan and monitor the execution of our strategic objectives. 

About the role

Working across a number of product and engineering teams to deliver a key piece of work, the successful candidate will need strong senior stakeholder management and experience leading significant technical cross org problems/projects.

The Senior Project Manager role is to lead our larger strategic projects of work from concept through to operational handover. Rapid project start up, world class delivery, and robust operational management are critical to ensuring we meet our objectives. You will be responsible for the planning, scoping, and scheduling of activities to complete projects to a high standard, whilst ensuring innovation and speed to market are maintained. Methodologies, frameworks and processes used to aid delivery will be selected and applied fit for purpose, therefore it is expected you have broad knowledge and understanding of various methods and approaches and continually seek to improve our ways of working.

(Note: This project will be delivering a specific piece of work - Spam project. It has 3 main stream of work: Discovery of spam related risks and developing a roadmap, Analysis for monitoring and blocking tools, Review of potential AI solutions to detect spam)

What you'll do

• Lead the planning, implementation, and delivery of projects on time, on budget and to the desired quality and scope.
• Facilitate the definition of scope, goals, and deliverables.
• Develop fit for purpose project management plans and approaches (including agile, iterative and waterfall).
• Work alongside the Project Leads, to assemble project teams from internal and external resource pools as required.
• Report on the progress of projects including risks and issues/problems and solutions at regular intervals.
• Contribute to the growth and improvement of the project teams and colleagues. Provide coaching and development for more junior members of the Projects team, and lead by example.
• Develop or contribute practices, templates, and other relevant artefacts to shared libraries to enable beautiful project practice 
• Contribute to ongoing process and practice improvement ideas and initiatives to support the ongoing improvement in our ways of working
• Role model what world class delivery looks like and respectfully challenge when the business veers from this path.
• Embrace and champion the project(s) assigned and drive the delivery of change to a high standard.
• Be able to manage concurrent pieces of work and prioritise the effort on each according to organisational priorities in discussion with the GM Projects/Project Leads
• Establish and maintain strong communications with all teams at Xero.
• Maintain a balanced perspective by building relationships and interacting with relevant internal and external stakeholders. 
• Work across the spectrum of project delivery activity from coordination to management, owning the outcome.
• Work closely with stakeholders to transition project deliverables into BAU.
• Develop repeatable processes where practicable to increase efficiency in project delivery.
• Clear and concise escalation of any complex risks or issues.

What you'll bring

• 6+ years demonstrated experience leading and delivering multiple projects.
• Experience working with security related projects
• Demonstrated experience leading complex projects and cross functional teams to deliver strategic outcomes.
• Demonstrated experience with maintaining and improving project financial processes including managing and tracking budgets
• Project management certification is an advantage (PMI, PRINCE 2, AgilePM or similar).
• Relevant infrastructure, data and application development, business process, business change or GTM subject matter expertise / demonstrated experience.
• Agile/iterative and waterfall approaches.
• Web/online/cloud/SaaS experience.
• Understanding of business processes, structures and organisations.
• Demonstrated experience managing multiple stakeholders and delivery teams.
• Demonstrated vendor management.
• Strong communication skills.
• Strong analytical skills.
• Strong commercial acumen. 
• Experience working with senior leaders, demonstrated experience preparing / reporting to C level.

What success looks like

• Project scope, goals and the delivery plan for projects are clear, concise and complete.
• Project teams have a clear understanding of the scope and definition of projects and their deliverables.
• Modelling project management best practices and behaviour.
• Consistently displaying leadership behaviour within the team and throughout the business.
• Cultivating and maintaining strong, mutually beneficial, relationships across the business.
• Successfully managing strategically important projects.
• Projects are delivered on time, within budget and to expected quality.
• Contribution and participation in company values, culture, and wider team.
• Exceptional stakeholder feedback.

Why Xero? 

Offering very generous paid leave to use however you’d like (plus statutory holidays!), dedicated paid leave to care for your physical and mental wellbeing as well as an Employee Assistance Program to access mental health care for you and your family, health insurance, life insurance, and income protection, wellbeing and sports programmes, employee resource groups, 26 weeks of paid parental leave for primary caregivers, an Employee Share Plan, beautiful offices, flexible working, career development, and many other benefits that reflect our human value, you’ll do the best work of your life at Xero.