Project Manager with Consumer Finance industry-Fiserv Governance support

Location: Bad Homburg, Germany

Work model: Fully Onsite

Contract duration: initial 6 months with high chances of further extension

German language is required; the level will be confirmed

Job title: Project manager

Years of experience: Overall 10 to 12 years with project management experience between 6-7 years.

Client: Fiserv

Scope Of Role

• Reporting to the Programme Director and/or Programme manager, the role of Project Manager is to scope, plan and deliver projects and initiatives to meet specified business needs, controlling resources from several areas (and potentially third parties) to achieve agreed cost, time and quality objectives.
• The Project Manager has the overall accountability and responsibility for the progress and successful delivery of the project effort.
  
  

Responsibilities

• During project planning, this function is responsible for:-
• Defining the project brief
• Setting client expectations in respect of deliverables, plans and management of the project.
• Establishing an appropriate project governance structure, in line with Fiservs programme/project methodology /governance
• Assisting the Client and Sponsor to obtain authorisations and sign-offs on the Business Case
• Documenting the overall project approach, including the phasing strategy and build versus buy options
• Developing estimates of resources, costs and durations and based on these, creating a high-level project schedule and requesting appropriate resources
• Facilitating the development of all elements of the project plans and schedule according to the project brief, i.e. plans for scope, schedule, budget, change management, issues, risk, procurement, testing, training, communication and transition to BAU. Agree plans with all relevant stakeholders
• Ensuring that any impacts of the project on business processes and business continuity are assessed and continually monitored as the project develops
  
  

Execution And Control

• Managing, maintaining and tracking the overall project plan, controls, budget and work assignments according to established First Data governance
• Reporting project status (schedule, cost, benefit, risk, issues and scope) to all stakeholders on a regular basis
• Organising and facilitating appropriate level of governance meetings, to discuss status reports, provide structured escalation path and determine corrective or preventive actions
• Managing project risks and issues, ensuring that project team members are actively involved in the identification and where appropriate the ownership of risks, initiating corrective action where necessary
• Ensuring that project team members are accurately recording their time spent on project tasks and thus tracking budget accurately
• Building and maintaining a cohesive cross organisation/company project team ethos and fostering productive working relationships, optimally assigning tasks to team members
• Ensuring the development and approval of all deliverables
• Refining resource, cost and duration estimates as the project progresses, ensuring that requests for resources for each phase are supplied sufficiently early to enable them to be secured when needed
• Managing proposed changes in scope, schedule or budget with key stakeholders relaying any impact to cost, schedule or scope and providing a recommended course of action.
• Scheduling, managing and participating in key quality reviews and developing action plans to resolve issues arising
• Organising, leading, and motivating a matrix team of Fiserv SME’s and potentially 3rd party resources
• Maintaining a dialogue with PMO to ensure that defined project processes are followed and that any issues are resolved in a timely manner
• Ensuring a clean, structured and fully supported transition to BAU
• Providing out of hours cover over implementation weekends when Project goes live
• Project administration
  
  

Closeout And Transition

• Obtaining approval from the sponsor that the acceptance criteria have been met
• Confirming that the project’s objectives have been achieved
• Confirming that all outstanding risks and issues have been accepted by the sponsor
• Performing comparisons of estimated and actual costs and completing financial closeout
• Facilitating the project evaluation and obtaining approval to closeout the project, documented within end project report
• Performing contract and project closeout activities, and archiving project information. Where applicable conducting a formal Lessons Learned session and publishing results to all stakeholders
  
  

Key Relationships

Programme Director, Programme Manager, Client, Programme Director, Project Sponsors and key stakeholders, Workstream Leads, Project Team Members, Fiserv Governance, Support Departments

Key Skills / Qualifications / Experience

• Significant proven Project Management experience preferably gained within the Consumer Finance industry
• Educated to degree-level in Computer Science, Business, Accounting, Marketing or equivalent work experience.
• Excellent verbal and written communications skills and English proficiency.
• History of matrix-managing others for the successful completion of a medium to large projects. Having managed full lifecycle projects with inter-dependent or direct resources
• Ability to facilitate meetings, reviews, and workshops involving internal and external participants.
• Excellent time management skills.
• Ability to travel.
• Ability on occasion to work outside of Company’s core
• Expert in MSOffice Products especially WORD, EXCEL, PowerPoint and MS-Project.
• Ability to work under pressure and with minimal supervision.
• Ability to manage in a virtual team environment.
• Enthusiasm and innovation to motivate others.
• Commitment to team building within FDI and the client and to support others in making the wider team a success.
• Ability to manage rapid change in a diverse and fast-paced environment.
• Ability to make information-based decisions (includes making decisions based upon little information and to deal effectively with ambiguity) on behalf of your team and to know what decisions should be escalated to senior level management.
• Ability to determine estimates of effort and impacts on a variety of solutions.
• Determination and drive to continually follow-up and validate information.
• In-depth understanding of business processes within Client portfolio.
• Ability to plan and monitor an entire programme consisting of multiple endpoints.
• Must take initiative in building a network of contacts within the First Data organization, interfacing with multiple IT groups and business units. Requires a high amount of independent discretion and decision-making.
• Self-driven individual with the ability to coach individuals and lead a process of knowledge transfer and mentoring.
• Works independently with functional, Fiserv business units and 3rd parties when necessary.
  
  

Preferred

• Multi-lingual, multi-country projects, and business travel experience.
• Considerable experience with VisionPLUS strongly preferred.
• Highly developed analytical and problem solving skills, and meticulous attention to detail.
• PRINCE2 certification.
• Subject Matter Expert/Business Analyst in at least one of the following areas strongly preferred: Regulatory, Compliance, Payment Schemes, Card Personalization, Application Processing, Customer Correspondence (Statements, Letters), Fulfillment, Collections, Risk/Fraud, Disputes, Chargebacks, Retrievals, Testing, and Consumer Finance, which can include Credit Cards, Loans, Debit Cards, and Retails Cards.