Senior Project Manager
Summary
Leads end-to-end ERP software implementations for mid-market customers — owning scope, schedule, budget, risk, and cross-functional coordination from kickoff through go-live and support handoff. Hybrid role requiring 3+ onsite days weekly in Lansing or Grand Rapids, MI, backed by 3+ years of ERP/SaaS project management experience.
- Own the end-to-end project lifecycle for ERP implementations, from kickoff through go-live and transition to support.
- Develop and maintain project plans, milestones, dependencies, resource plans, budgets, governance, and communication structures.
- Monitor project performance against scope, schedule, budget, quality, and customer expectations; identify and drive corrective action when needed.
- Identify, track, mitigate, and escalate project risks, issues, dependencies, and resource constraints.
- Manage scope and change requests, evaluating and communicating impacts to schedule, resources, cost, and deliverables.
- Maintain project documentation, including project plans, status reports, RAID logs, decisions, action items, and other governance artifacts.
- Coordinate testing, data migration, training, readiness, cutover, go-live, and post-go-live transition activities.
- Serve as the primary project-management contact for assigned customers and build trusted relationships with sponsors, executives, business leaders, and project teams.
- Establish effective meeting cadences, communication plans, decision-making processes, and stakeholder accountability.
- Facilitate project kickoff meetings, status meetings, steering committees, workshops, and executive reviews.
- Communicate project status, accomplishments, risks, decisions, and required actions clearly and consistently.
- Set and manage customer expectations, drive timely decisions, and address difficult project situations in a professional, solutions-oriented manner.
- Develop a practical understanding of customer business processes, organizational objectives, and ERP requirements.
- Coordinate functional and technical workstreams across core ERP areas such as finance, accounting, operations, supply chain, manufacturing, distribution, sales, purchasing, and CRM.
- Coordinate requirements, solution design, configuration, integrations, reporting, data migration, testing/UAT, training, and deployment activities.
- Ensure project deliverables align with the agreed solution design, implementation methodology, scope, and customer objectives.
- Help identify gaps between standard ERP capabilities and customer requirements and facilitate practical solutions.
- Promote the effective use of standard ERP functionality while appropriately evaluating and managing customization requests.
- Ensure key requirements, assumptions, decisions, dependencies, and changes are documented and communicated.
- Monitor project financials, resource utilization, forecasts, staffing requirements, and overall project performance.
- Identify scope, delivery, resource, or schedule issues that could create financial exposure and work with services leadership to address them.
- Support project margin management, resource planning, and staffing decisions.
- Manage scope changes and support change-order development and commercial discussions when project requirements change.
- Maintain clear ownership and due dates for corrective actions and escalate significant risks, issues, and decisions in a timely manner.
- Provide day-to-day leadership and coordination for cross-functional implementation teams.
- Establish clear responsibilities, expectations, priorities, and deadlines.
- Facilitate collaboration between business, functional, technical, development, and customer resources.
- Remove obstacles, resolve conflicts, and drive accountability without relying on formal authority.
- Identify resource constraints and partner with leadership to resolve staffing or capacity issues.
- Contribute to continuous improvement of implementation methodologies, templates, tools, and delivery practices.
- Manage custom software development projects, coordinating requirements, schedules, resources, testing, and delivery.
- Support customer user acceptance testing (UAT), including planning, coordination, issue tracking, and readiness activities.
- Monitor and coordinate customer support tickets, ensuring issues are appropriately prioritized, assigned, tracked, escalated, and communicated through resolution.
- Coordinate with development, support, and product teams to ensure customer issues and enhancement requests are appropriately addressed.
- 3+ years of project-management experience, preferably in software implementation, ERP, SaaS, IT consulting, or professional services.
- Bachelor's degree in Accounting, Finance, Business, Information Systems, Computer Science, Operations, or a related field.
- Demonstrated experience managing software or ERP implementation projects involving multiple functional and technical workstreams.
- Experience working directly with mid-market or enterprise customers.
- Strong understanding of project scope, schedule, budget, resources, dependencies, risks, issues, and change management.
- Excellent written, verbal, presentation, and interpersonal communication skills.
- Ability to manage multiple concurrent projects and priorities in a fast-paced environment.
- Strong organizational, analytical, problem-solving, and conflict-resolution skills.
- Ability to communicate effectively with both business stakeholders and technical teams.
- Demonstrated ability to lead through influence, establish accountability, and drive progress across cross-functional teams.
- Willingness to travel periodically for customer meetings, workshops, training, or go-live activities.
- Experience implementing a mid-market ERP platform.
- Experience with SaaS or cloud-based ERP implementations.
- PMP, PRINCE2, Scrum, Agile, or similar project-management certification.
- Experience with finance, accounting, manufacturing, distribution, supply chain, professional services, or other core ERP business processes.
- Experience with ERP integrations, data migration, reporting, or business-process transformation.
- Experience managing custom software development projects or third-party vendors.
- Experience with project-management tools such as Intervals, Microsoft Project, Smartsheet, Jira, Monday.com, Asana, or similar platforms.