Director of Project Management

Company: Grafik
Location: Alexandria
Posted on: January 27, 2023

Job Description:

As a Director of Project Management, you have a passion for delivering high-quality client work, pro bono jobs, and internal projects. You sit at the cross-section of client projects and leading the internal team to self-organization. As the Director of Project Management, you will motivate and guide the team to have the right people in the right place at the right time in order to move projects forward and produce exceptional work as efficiently as possible, while staying on time and on budget. The project management team at Grafik owns the process from project inception to completion, including participation in budget determination, creation of project schedules, managing resources for deliverables, raising red flags when a project is in danger of being out of scope, budget or timeline, and ensuring adherence to the approval process. Naturally process-oriented, you will demonstrate and champion the project management team towards proactively improving processes within Grafik by failing fast using forward-thinking ideas in the interest of building an exceptional client experience. Furthermore, as a Director of Project Management, you have a proven history of building and managing project teams that experience low turnover and achieve client growth. Role and Responsibilities Your primary responsibilities are to lead the development and adoption of the Grafik project management processes, including management and oversight of client deliverables, and the project management team. The Director of Project Management will participate and lead their team in the following areas:

• --- Apply servant leadership, identifying areas of opportunity, what is working, what needs to change, or where more effort can be focused to increase the performance of their team including following up with the internal team after a project or campaign is delivered to review successes, challenges, key learnings, and client feedback.
• --- Have a solid command of agency workflow as well as reporting tools and how they impact agency financial performance.
• --- Understand resource utilization and capacity and make hiring recommendations accordingly.
• --- Be proactive in collaborating with other departments and maintain healthy conversations with agency leadership.
• --- Assist the leadership team in handling strategic client partnerships.
• --- Establish clear expectations with project team members.
• --- Facilitate the management and delivery of projects and ongoing marketing campaigns wherein you serve as the primary project management lead.
• --- Ensure account profitability by managing client expectations around service delivery.
• --- Act as the primary liaison among internal departments and as backup liaison with client contact when needed to keep a project on schedule and on budget.
• --- Collaborate with Account Managers, clients, and other team members to fully vet and holistically understand the deliverable. Level-set client expectations, timelines, business objectives, and prioritization around a new deliverable with our creative and production partners (both employees and subcontractors).
• --- Work to develop timelines and budgets, and assign appropriate resources to deliver on time and on budget to meet campaign or project goals.
• --- Manage day-to-day operational and tactical aspects of multiple projects, sometimes with tight deadlines.
• --- Participate in agency, project team and client meetings, as well as brainstorming sessions to capture new messaging, creative, and strategic opportunities for clients, as needed.
• --- Coordinate the assignment of internal and external team members to assemble the appropriate resources for the respective projects.
• --- Support Business Development and Account Managers in preparing accurate estimates for campaigns and projects with scoping of resources, dependencies, timelines, and budgets.
• --- Work with Account Managers on monitoring and communicating the impacts and/or risks of changes in project scope to the appropriate stakeholders, and make necessary adjustments as needed to ensure that project timelines, budgets and quality are not adversely affected.
• --- Provide information to map out intended client projects in a capacity plan for review against other work in progress.
• --- With direction from Account Managers, contribute and collaborate to develop a sound implementation plan that meets the project strategy within the scope, budget, time constraints, and quality.
• --- Manages the schedule throughout the project lifecycle to track progress and make necessary adjustments for any changes that may be necessary.
• --- Secure approvals at all stages of the workflow process.
• --- Ensure adherence to all quality assurance tasks to minimize risk or errors.
• --- Empower project management team to ensure that all project documents are captured and files are categorized appropriately.
• --- Ensure that projects have been opened, and estimates/budgets have been established and properly approved prior to work starting.
• --- Organize and set clear expectations for tasks and deliverables, communicating to the team.
• --- Monitor production progress and promptly communicate issues to Account Managers.
• --- Maintain continuity of processes, learning, and quality assurance across all projects.
• --- Regularly monitor team health ensuring strong relationships are built and maintained. Desired Skills, Qualifications and Experience As a successful Director of Project Management you will possess the following level of skills, qualifications, and experience:
  • --- Five to seven years of experience in managing a project team in an agile agency environment.
  • --- Excellent attention to detail required.
  • --- Strong organizational skills, with the ability to learn new systems and processes quickly while working in a deadline-oriented environment.
  • --- Understanding of marketing, advertising, web development, and brand strategy projects.
  • --- Proven track record of multi-tasking while managing multiple clients.
  • --- Ability to effectively communicate project status, requirements, changes, risks, and issues to appropriate stakeholders, including clients.
  • --- Proven track record of driving project profitability.
  • --- Ability to communicate ideas and information in writing and verbally, in a manner that is complete, clear, concise, organized, respectful, and appropriate to the audience.
  • --- Ability to organize and focus on key priorities and carefully plan.
  • --- Demonstrated persistence, tenacity, and willingness to go the distance to get something done.
  • --- The ability to work effectively in a fast-paced (sometimes chaotic environment) while maintaining a sense of perspective and humor is preferred.
  • --- Adaptable to changing priorities and scope with the ability to cope effectively with complexity.
  • --- Knowledge of the AGILE, Waterfall, or other project management processes, including working with and creating project schedules is required.
  • --- Experience hiring and managing third-party vendor partners preferred.
  • --- Experience in defining and managing the scope of online and offline projects required.
  • --- Passion for problem-solving, consensus-building, and getting great work out the door required. This position is ideally located on the East Coast, preferably greater Washington D.C. or Philadelphia markets with the ability to work remotely.

Keywords: Grafik, Alexandria , Director of Project Management, Executive , Alexandria, Virginia