Technical Program Manager, Portfolio
Western Governors UniversityAbout the role
If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.
Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.
Essential Functions and Responsibilities:
- The Technical Program Manager, Portfolio is an Enabler/Catalyst for the support of the organizational strategy that works with multiple stakeholders and teams to orchestrate the release of value delivery across projects.
- Works collaboratively with other Program Managers, Product Managers, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, business, and Ed Tech stakeholders to identify and ensure strategic alignment, track and resolve dependencies and promote successful conflict resolution.
- Is tenacious in building cross program/team relationships.
- Facilitates the implementation and leads program governance.
- Tracks and reports on program health and delivery progress.
- Implements measurement systems that provide empirical insights into value delivery and opportunities to improve. Limits work in progress and ensures successful commitments and objectives that are outcome and impact based.
- Drives toward continuous operational improvement through analyzing data and inspecting/adapting practices.
- Is bold and data-driven when uncovering and communicating issues.
- Collaborates with Product Managers, Technical Leaders, and other key stakeholders to create and maintain a program roadmap of value-based and outcome-driven deliverables that align tightly with organizational strategy.
- Focuses on communication and documentation of objectives to maximize transparency and alignment.
- Asks the difficult questions that drives the successful delivery of outcomes.
- Actively participates in community development of project and agile roles and the establishment of, and adherence to guardrails, policies, and best practices.
- Acts as an agent of change as we strengthen our agile mindset across the organization. Works with Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters to continuously improve agility and foster an environment of self-organization and highly accountable teams.
- Is an emotionally and situationally aware leader who supports teams with meeting their commitments through removal of impediments, and facilitation of resolution and action-oriented conversations. Empathize with others, and create an environment of mutual influence, openness, and respect.
- Work with leadership to establish and facilitate value-add Program Increment (PI) events on a recurring and predictable cadence
Knowledge, Skill and Abilities:
- Experience in managing enterprise level programs.
- Adept at coordinating and delivering large and complex solutions that require the coordination of multiple stakeholders, project teams, Scrum teams, Product domains, and vendors.
- Experience with SAFe, Scrum@Scale or other enterprise agile frameworks.
- Effective trainer of individuals at all organizational levels and an expert in agile practices and tools.
- Emotionally intelligent and a true leader-who-serves; there to help the teams do their best work. Is humble, introspective, and willing to experiment and try new ways of working.
- Skilled at protecting the teams, helping them to focus and accelerate value delivered.
- Exhibit a demonstrated ability to understand value streams and execute on organizational strategy, translating tactical/technical approaches into user value statements.
- Expert facilitator with bias for resolution and action over extensive deliberation.
- Demonstrates critical thinking and exhibits excellent judgment.
- Takes pride and ownership over the quality of our products.
Competencies:
Organizational Impact:
- Responsible for implementing programs to support initiatives and projects established by university or department leadership; assist with the establishment of operational plans for department with short-term impact on results.
- May deliver input into new processes, standards, or plans that impact overall university or department results.
Problem Solving & Decision Making:
- Leverages a systems-thinking approach for improving existing processes
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