Senior Technical Project Manager

Knight Frank is looking to hire a Senior Technical Project Manager to join the Technical Projects Department based in our London Head office.  In this position you will own and oversee a number of projects and you will be responsible for ensuring Knight Frank deliveries successful and high value Projects and Programmes. Line management may feature.

Knight Frank is the leading independent international property consultancy based in the UK offering agency and professional advice across Commercial, Residential and Rural sectors. Established in 1897, Knight Frank now comprises a global network of over 523 offices in 60 territories. 

Responsibilities:

Delivery

• Accountability for one or more technology projects (delivery through others may feature), that make up the Technology Portfolio this is likely to include infrastructure, hardware, migration to cloud and potential software projects
• Ensuring your projects focus on the business change as well as technical development, ensuring a fully rounded project delivery.
• Scope – Ensuring Scope (In scope and out of scope) is clearly defined, approved at initiation and managed and controlled throughout delivery.
• Risks, Issues, Dependencies and Assumptions - Proactively identify risks, issue, dependencies and assumptions and work to communicate, manage, escalate and mitigate (or accept in certain circumstances) them successfully throughout the project lifecycle.
• Roles and responsibilities – Ensure clear roles and responsibilities are set at project initiation across the extended project delivery and stakeholder team, ensuring people understand their responsibilities and commitments associated with these.
• Governance models – Deploy appropriate governance models to the size of the project – ensuring governance is not over-engineered but maintaining appropriate control.
• Specialist engagement – ensure that all projects, as part of initiation, engage with the relevant specialist areas to assure delivery and protect Knight Frank.  These include, but are not limited to: Data Protection, Information Security, Legal, Procurement, IT, HR, Accounts, Marketing, Communications and Data Office.
• Stakeholders - Ensure appropriate stakeholder engagement, encouraging the business to identify value in solutions, be involved in shaping solutions and remain engaged with projects throughout their lifecycle
• Data / Info security – Throughout the lifecycle of a project, ensure data and info security standards are adhered to
• Change control – Ensure Scope, Cost and Time changes are managed within tolerance and change control is used to agree those changes beyond tolerance, with robust planning and project management allowing early identification of potential changes
• Testing / quality management – delivery of robust test plans and approaches for solutions, including clear business understanding of test coverage, exclusions (and associated risk) and always seeking business sign off to test outcomes and open defects (pre implementation)
• Training & Communication - Develop appropriate training and communication plans, working closely with the business stakeholders to shape methods, messages and successful execution.
• Planning – construct strong project plans – allowing easy identification of issues, ensure these are living documents used to support management of the project and to drive timely escalation.
• Resource – Proactively manage the projects resource needs, working with the teams to secure these and ensuring early escalation of any additional un-planned demand
• Configuration / Document management – put in place / utilise existing configuration management solutions and ensure that key project artifacts are stored safely (along with sign off confirmations)
• Work with procurement to put in place contracts (including work on RFPs / RFQs / Statements of work etc), where appropriate, for new suppliers / elements of work
• Coordinate internal resources and external parties to ensure project delivery
• Conducting workshops, presentations and design and solution walkthroughs/reviews
• Produce and maintain key documents, such as: Proposals / Business Cases, Reports, Financial Models, requirements, requirements tracing, decision matrices, RAID logs, transformation roadmaps etc.
• Chair project steering meetings and present project at Board level (as required)
• Provide regular reporting to line manager, governance forums and PMO
• Regularly review delivery to ensure workstreams are on track, but also periodically challenging to confirm initiatives still meet the firms strategic needs.
• Support Procurement contract negotiations and work orders where appropriate
• Monitoring suppliers performance against contract (where applicable)

People Management – This role may include line management of junior project team members.

• Empower, Inspire and lead a team of direct and matrix managed Project professionals.
• Set clear expectations for Project roles and ensure Project resources deliver to those for Knight Frank – Actively flagging under performance where seen.
• Responsible for appraisals, coaching team members and encourage wider coaching across the Project Management domain.
• Identify opportunities to encourage and celebrate diversity
• Role model the Knight Frank Values and actively encourage and monitor these in the team.

Financial & Resource Management

• Be accountable for your projects costs, budgets and forecasts.
• Ensure Project spend is periodically reviewed against business case, to ensure timely identification of any overspend risks and appropriate senior review to confirm validity of ongoing business case.
• Work to assure delivery of financial and non-financial benefits agreed at time of project inception, including close liaison with individual business areas who will own individual benefit commitments.

Stakeholder Management

• Identify, build, manage and maintain positive working relationships with core stakeholders across the firm.
• Utilise stakeholder relationships to maintain good business insight.
• Use knowledge of stakeholder businesses and their drivers to help influence key decisions, in line with business Objectives.

Leadership

• Use your technical and business experience to actively support the Projects Department.  Open challenge is encouraged to ensure we deliver our best for the business
• Share your knowledge freely, investing in us achieving as a team

Professional experience and personal skills profile specific to this role

• Proven ability to quickly learn about a business area, it’s processes and its business imperatives and then apply this knowledge to the project.
• Ability to Quickly develop credibility and rapport with senior staff 
• Polished and professional with the ability to adapt written and verbal communication styles to people at all levels and draw out issues and requirements 
• Excellent interpersonal skills, able to form good relationships  
• Highly organised, systematic and adaptable, with the ability to recognise the relative importance of tasks and to prioritise work effectively 
• Excellent attention to detail 
• Approach situations and problems positively, showing inherent flexibility and proactivity
• You will have a “hands on” attitude and possess the necessary skills across project disciplines to provide an effective support service to the business
• Excellent knowledge of MS Office applications (inc. MS Visio and MS Project)
• Excellent stakeholder management – from Board to project team level 
• Great at proactively identifying and solving problems 
• Pragmatic decision making and situation appropriate assertiveness 
• Commercial experience, working with 3rd parties and suppliers to provision solutions
• Proven experience of working in a matrix model, ensuring others deliver and commit to what is required to deliver your project

Qualifications

• Project Management certification (One of: Prince 2 Practioner, PMP or APMP))
• Additional appropriate certifications are beneficial (including: P3O, SAFe, Less, APMP International - BA, Agile BA Practitioner, BCS Certificate in Business Analysis / Modelling Business Processes / Requirements Engineering, Scrum Master, Agile PM, Prince 2 Agile Practitioner etc)

Career Experience

• 7 years+ in a direct project management role
• 10 years+ working in the Project environment
• Line Management experience
• Experience of managing both business and technical projects
• Experience managing the end to end delivery of projects / full project life cycle 
• Experience working within a 1,000+  FTE organisation
• Worked in the IT environment is of benefit

To view other vacancies within the Knight Frank Group click here.