Senior Manager, IT Programs and Projects

Church’s Texas Chicken

Employee Job Description

Job Title: Senior Manager, IT Programs and Projects

Reports To: SVP of Technology

Department: Technology and Digital Platforms

Location: Atlanta – RSC

Revised: April 2026

Job Summary: Responsible for the hands-on management and delivery of technology programs and projects across Church’s Texas Chicken’s restaurant operations, infrastructure, and enterprise back-office portfolios, while also establishing and maintaining the project management standards, governance frameworks, and portfolio visibility practices that define how the technology organization plans, tracks, and reports on its work. This is first and foremost a delivery role — the Senior Manager is expected to be in the room, driving execution, removing obstacles, and holding teams and vendors accountable to dates and deliverables, while also elevating the overall project management capability and discipline of the IT organization.

Key Duties/Responsibilities:

• Directly manage the delivery of selected high-priority technology programs and projects spanning restaurant operations technology, IT infrastructure, and enterprise back-office systems, serving as the primary accountable owner for scope, schedule, budget, and stakeholder satisfaction.
• Apply waterfall, agile, or hybrid delivery methodologies as appropriate to the nature and context of each project, demonstrating fluency in both approaches and the judgment to select and adapt the right framework for each engagement.
• Lead project initiation activities including charter development, scope definition, stakeholder alignment, resource planning, risk identification, and establishment of governance and communication cadences.
• Maintain rigorous project tracking at the work package and task level using portfolio management tools such as Monday.com or Smartsheet, ensuring that project data is current, accurate, and actionable.
• Facilitate effective project meetings, sprint reviews, steering sessions, and working groups, driving structured agendas, clear decisions, and accountable action items that maintain project momentum.
• Manage project budgets, forecast expenditures, and report on financial performance against approved project budgets throughout the delivery lifecycle.
• Establish and lead cadence-driven project and portfolio status update processes, developing and delivering appropriate reporting for each stakeholder group.
• Serve as the organization’s go-to resource for troubled project recovery, applying a proven set of diagnostic and turnaround methods to rapidly assess root causes, stabilize delivery, and restore stakeholder confidence in at-risk or off-track initiatives.
• Conduct structured project health assessments on struggling programs, identifying scope creep, dependency failures, resource gaps, decision bottlenecks, and stakeholder misalignment as root causes and developing targeted recovery plans.
• Lead difficult project conversations with appropriate candor and professionalism, delivering honest assessments of project status and recovery requirements to leadership and business stakeholders without diminishing credibility or team morale.
• Implement recovery governance structures including accelerated reporting cadences, escalation protocols, scope triage processes, and focused workstream management that re-establish control and predictability on challenged projects.
• Build lessons learned frameworks that capture recovery insights and translate them into improved project initiation and risk management practices across the portfolio going forward.
• Develop and manage a portfolio-level view of all active technology projects across restaurant operations, infrastructure, and enterprise back office domains.
• Define and support project intake and prioritization processes that ensure new technology initiatives are properly scoped and resourced before work begins.
• Establish consistent project reporting standards including status report formats, RAG assessment criteria, milestone tracking conventions, and escalation thresholds that apply across all project teams.
• Champion the adoption and effective use of portfolio and project management tooling across the technology organization, serving as the primary owner of platforms such as Monay.com or Smartsheet.
• Develop and deliver project and portfolio status presentations for audiences ranging from senior technology leadership to operational field teams and in-store restaurant staff, translating complex project data into clear, relevant narratives for each audience.
• Build strong working relationships with cross-functional business partners.
• Engage with Franchise partners and field leadership on projects that affect restaurant