Johannesburg: Project Manager – 6 month contract in Johannesburg posted by Mindmatch Consulting

The Business Project Manager works across both commercial and technical domains, responsible for end-to-end project delivery within a complex, multi-workstream environment. This role requires balancing cross-functional project requirements, often integrating various departments and external partners.

Project Managers Reporting and Accountability: Reports to the Head of Portfolio Delivery and is responsible for achieving the projects strategic objectives, ensuring alignment with both business and technical goals.

Leadership and Workstream Management: The Project Manager leads a cross-functional project team, often including specific Workstream Managers such as Commercial Stakeholders, Technical Delivery Partner, Testing Lead and Change Lead. This role requires coordinating these leaders to ensure synergy, alignment on goals, and cohesive progress across all areas.

The Project Manager is the person who has the overall responsibility for the successful initiation, planning, design, execution, monitoring, controlling, go to market, benefits tracking and closure of the project.

The project manager must have a combination of skills including an ability to ask penetrating questions, detect unstated assumptions and resolve conflicts, as well as more general management skills.

Key among the project manager’s duties is the recognition that risk, issues, and scope changes that directly impacts the likelihood of success and that these risks, issues and scope changes must be both formally and informally managed throughout the lifecycle of the project.

Weve identified 9 critical core competencies that we believe to be imperative to the success of the project manager, and in turn, the successful execution of their duties:

Execution

• Drives detailed scope development and management, aligning with strategic objectives and stakeholder requirements.
• Develops and manages comprehensive project budgets, schedules, and timelines integrating contingency planning and resource optimization
• Employs strong (advanced) organizational and prioritization skills to ensure effective task execution
• Incorporates time management principles and leverages project management tools to streamline workflows
• Integrates ongoing risk management trade-offs, by integrating risk management practices, proactively identifying and addressing potential risks and dependencies.
• Drive commercial readiness across all stakeholders (internal & external)
• Familiarity with software development, knowledge of Scrum Techniques, and artifacts

Decision Making

• Collects and structures the available data impacting the project to ensure effective time, cost, quality and scope management.
• Makes timely decisions based on facts, circumstances, and needs.
• Conducts scenario analysis considering various outcomes and mitigating risks, to guide strategic decision-making.

Communications

• Delivers clear and impactful communication to all key stakeholders, both internal and external, across written and verbal channels.
• Selects appropriate communication mediums for diverse stakeholder groups, ensuring engagement, transparency, and alignment.
• Derives actionable insights from collected data, translating complex information into accessible, meaningful messages.
• Employs active listening to ensure effective understanding of information being shared
• Prepares and delivers engaging, results-oriented presentations tailored to different audiences, from executives to technical teams

Strategy Development

• Understands the cross-functional impact of the project on various departments and the broader organizational ecosystem.
• Aligns project goals with overall business objectives to maximize Return On Investment.
• Integrates business goals into the project scope and deliverables
• Develops clear metrics to track progress and ensure project alignment with strategic goals ,
• Understands project and organizational dependencies throughout the lifecycle of the project

Team Management

• Motivates and inspires project teams to achieve excellence to drive deliberate project outcomes
• Leads by example
• Manages and resolves conflict
• Builds and sustains relationships within and outside the team
• Delegates responsibilities effectively to optimize Team performance
• Ensures team alignment with organizational governance structures.
• Manage a well-defined project management process and champion ongoing process improvement initiatives to implement best practices for Agile Project Management
• The projects may consist of multiple Agile teams and require integration with other activities outside the scope of the Agile teams
• Business Acumen
• Understands industry trends and their impact on business and project delivery
• Responds to market and business changes that affect the project and business
• Monitors competition and market trends that impacts on the project and business

Technical Competence

• Understands and integrates appropriate project management tools and processes
• Sufficient level of technical background to provide leadership to technical delivery teams and to be able to accurately and objectively evaluate complex project risks and issues related to the SDLC
• Experience in managing and implementing ML and AI projects

Critical Thinking

• Determine and regularly evaluate the validity of project progress.
• Maintains project objectivity
• Applies ongoing analysis to the project to ensure alignment with project scope and goals
• Integrates the project with cross functional objectives

Leadership

• Takes proactive initiative
• Mentors and guide team members
• Monitor and implement changes efficiently
• Navigate complex organizational landscapes with tact and diplomacy to ensure stakeholder buy in

Resource Experience and qualifications:

• Bachelors degree
• Project Management Certification (PMP,CAPM, Agile, Prince2, etc)

Minimum of 6 years experience –

• Minimum 3-5 years managing projects for end to end delivery using PMBOK/PRINCE2 methodologies
• Experience in taking products to market (Go to market)
• Experience in Managing complex/cross-functional projects
• Agile Experience
• Knowledge of other Agile approaches: XP, Kanban, Crystal, FDD, etc.
• Good technical knowledge of IT project implementation, ML and AI project execution
• Awareness and experience with widely successful Agile techniques: User Stories, ATDD, TDD, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing, Pairing, Automated Testing.
• The experience in applying a wide variety of well-documented patterns and techniques for filling in the intentional gaps left in the Scrum approach