Senior Business & Technical Project Manager

The Senior Business & Technical Project Manager will lead end-to-end delivery of projects and initiatives, acting as the primary bridge between Business stakeholders and Technical delivery teams. The role is responsible for understanding business needs, translating them into clear project requirements and deliverables, coordinating technical delivery, managing risks and dependencies, and ensuring projects are completed in alignment with agreed scope, schedule, quality and business expectations. The position requires someone who can operate comfortably in both business-functional discussions and technical delivery discussions, while maintaining strong project governance and stakeholder management.

Key Responsibilities

1. Business Engagement & Requirements

• Serve as the primary Project Management in contact between Business stakeholders and technical teams.

• Work with Business Owners and stakeholders to understand business objectives, problems, priorities and expected outcomes.

• Facilitate requirements of clarification and ensure business requirements are sufficiently defined before technical delivery begins.

• Translate business needs into clear project scope, objectives, deliverables, milestones and acceptance criteria.

• Challenge unclear requirements, assumptions and priorities where necessary.

• Ensure Business and Technical teams maintain a common understanding of scope and expected outcomes.

• Coordinate business decisions, validations, UAT, and acceptance.

2. Technical Delivery Management

• Manage application and digital initiatives from initiation through implementation and closure.

• Work closely with Development, QA, Technical Leads, and other technology teams to establish the delivery approach.

• Facilitate technical discussions without replacing the accountability of Technical Leads or solution specialists.

• Ensure technical activities and deliverables are aligned with approved business requirements.

• Track development, testing, defect resolution, integration, deployment, and readiness activities.

• Manage dependencies between development, QA, infrastructure, security, business, and other supporting teams.

• Identify technical risks, constraints, and blockers and drive them towards resolution.

• Ensure technical deliverables meet agreed quality and acceptance requirements.

3. End-to-End Project Management

The Project Manager will own the overall project lifecycle, including:

Initiation

• Clarify business problems and objectives.

• Confirm stakeholders, scope and expected outcomes.

• Develop the Project Charter and initial project plan.

• Identify assumptions, constraints, dependencies, and high-level risks.

• Establish project governance and communication structure.

Planning

• Develop and maintain the detailed project plan.

• Define deliverables, milestones, dependencies, and ownership.

• Coordinate estimates and resource requirements with technical teams.

• Establish RAID, communication, and governance mechanisms.

• Ensure scope and requirements are sufficiently defined before execution.

Execution

• Coordinate Business, Development, QA and supporting teams.

• Track delivery against committed milestones.

• Facilitate project meetings and decision-making.

• Manage issues, dependencies, and escalations.

• Coordinate UAT, implementation of readiness, and business acceptance.

Monitoring & Control

• Monitor scope, schedule, risks, issues, actions, and decisions.

• Maintain RAID and project status reporting.

• Identify variances early and establish recovery plans when required.

• Escalate issues requiring management or Business decisions.

• Control of changes affecting project scope, timeline, or resources.

• Provide concise project reporting to stakeholders and management.

Closure

• Secure acceptance of project deliverables.

• Ensure documentation and operational handover are completed.

• Track remaining actions and transition to support where appropriate.

• Facilitate lessons learned and project closure.

Stakeholder Management

The role will interact extensively with:

• Business Owners

• Product/Application Owners

• Technical Leads

• Development Team

• QA / Testing Team

• Infrastructure and other Technical SMEs

• Security/Compliance teams, where applicable

• External vendors, where applicable

• ESSPI PMO and Management

The role must be able to adjust communication based on the audience, moving from business outcomes, risks and decisions with senior stakeholders to requirements, dependencies, defects, and delivery constraints with technical teams.

Project Governance Responsibilities

The Project Manager will:

• Maintain accurate project plans and status.

• Maintain RAID, action, and decision logs.

• Establish clear ownership and due dates.

• Facilitate regular project governance meetings.

• Track agreed deliverables and milestones.

• Ensure changes to scope are evaluated and approved.

• Identify schedule or delivery risks early.

• Escalate unresolved issues with clear impact, options, and recommendations.

• Keep Business and Technical stakeholders aligned throughout delivery.

• Ensure formal acceptance and closure of deliverables.

This governance emphasis is consistent with existing PMO initiation practices, where Project Managers lead requirement clarification, develop initiation deliverables such as Project Charters and stakeholder lists, identify risks and dependencies, and prepare projects for approval and kick-off.

Required Qualifications & Experience Essential

• Proven experience managing application development, digital transformation, or technology projects.

• Strong understanding of the software/application delivery lifecycle.

• Demonstrated ability to manage both Business-facing and Technical-facing discussions.

• Experience coordinating cross-functional Development, QA and Business teams.

• Strong project planning, risk management, dependency management, and issue-resolution skills.

• Ability to translate business requirements into structured project deliverables and actionable technical workstreams.

• Strong stakeholder management and executive communication skills.

• Ability to work with limited supervision and independently drive projects forward.

• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making capability.

• Ability to manage multiple priorities in a dynamic delivery environment.

Preferred

• Project management certification such as PMP, PRINCE2 or equivalent.

• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum and hybrid project delivery.

• Familiarity with Azure DevOps/Azure Boards or equivalent delivery-management tools.

• Working knowledge of application architecture, APIs/integrations, databases, environments, testing and deployment concepts.

Technical Knowledge Expectations

This should not be positioned as a Technical Lead role. The PM does not need to design or develop the solution. However, I recommend requiring enough technical fluency to effectively manage and challenge delivery across areas such as:

• Application development lifecycle

• APIs and system integrations

• Databases and data flows

• Development/Test/UAT/Production environments

• Functional and technical testing

• Defect management

• Release and deployment management

• Application and infrastructure dependencies

• Technical risks and constraints

The current scope references C#/.NET, SQL and other Digital Tools, so familiarity with application development concepts around these technologies would be advantageous.