Senior Project Manager
Telana · Preston
Who are we?
Telana are experts in applied innovation, focused on delivering business outcomes through AI, data, software development, and cloud engineering expertise. We leverage our problem solving skills and end-to-end capabilities to help our clients create better solutions for their customers and employees.
As a top-tier partner of Google Cloud and Microsoft, the market leaders for AI, Data, and Cloud, we work with some of the world’s biggest brands and government organisations to help them solve their toughest business and operational challenges; whether that’s attracting new customers, driving operational efficiency, or improving reducing risk.
We have received impressive external recognition for its innovative offerings, best-in-class capabilities, and tangible impact for customers across various industries: Telana is recognized as a Leader for Data, Analytics, and Machine Learning in the ISG Provider™ Lens for Google Cloud Partner Ecosystem in 2024, and a Rising Star in 2022 and 2023. We are an accredited Azure Expert MSP provider, and have also been awarded Google Cloud’s 2024 EMEA Public Sector Partner of the Year award.
What will your role be?
As a Senior Project Manager, you will be responsible for driving the successful, strategic delivery of complex, cross-functional engineering programs.
What will you be doing?
Project Execution & Delivery
- Own the Roadmap: Provide strategic leadership and oversight to define and execute the long-term delivery roadmap for one or more critical project areas or programs, ensuring alignment with overarching business strategy.
- Lead the Delivery Lifecycle: Own and lead the execution of projects from finalised requirements through design, development, quality assurance, and deployment, maintaining strict control over scope, schedule, budget, and quality.
- Agile Process Champion: Drive the efficient functioning of the development team by expertly running the entire Agile sprint cycle. This includes advanced backlog refinement, rigorous sprint planning based on capacity, and monitoring progress using key metrics (velocity, burndown).
- Risk & Impediment Management: Proactively identify, analyse, and mitigate project-level risks and dependencies. Act as the primary blocker remover, escalating and resolving impediments swiftly to maintain team flow.
- Ability to understand and provide feedback on estimates provided by engineers.
Agile Governance & Scaling
- Define and Govern Agile Practices: Champion Agile and Scrum best practices (including flow, estimation, and capacity planning) across multiple engineering teams.
- Metrics & Reporting: Maintain, track, and transparently report on project health using key metrics (e.g., velocity, capacity utilisation, burndown, and task breakdown) to provide accurate forecasts and manage stakeholder expectations.
- Impediment Removal: Act as the primary escalation point, quickly facilitating the resolution of issues and impediments that block progress across teams.
- Ceremony Ownership: Lead all Agile ceremonies (planning, reviews, retrospectives, stand-ups).
Communication & Collaboration
- Facilitate Technical Alignment: Bridge communication between engineering and stakeholders, ensuring the technical design and implementation path aligns perfectly with business objectives and vision.
- Dependency Coordination: Manage complex cross-functional dependencies, coordinating delivery milestones with other engineering teams.
- Documentation and Visibility: Maintain high-quality process documentation, ensuring team conventions and best practices are clearly visible and consistently followed.
Release Management & Continuous Improvement
- Own the Release Pipeline: Coordinate and manage all aspects of releases, including scheduling and communication plans (internal and external).
- Feedback Integration: Implement structured feedback loops with customers to capture insights on deliverables and translate them into actionable inputs for the backlog.
- Ceremony Leadership: Expertly lead all core Agile ceremonies (Sprint Planning, Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives, and Daily Stand-ups) to foster a culture of transparency and accountability.
- Tooling Management: Maintain and optimise the Jira project configuration, workflows, and boards to accurately reflect the team's progress, capacity, and current priorities.
This may be you:
- Demonstrable experience working with technical teams
- Proven expertise in applying project management principles to manage scope, schedule, and resources for technical projects.
- Expert proficiency with modern Agile methodologies (Scrum/Kanban) and strong familiarity with traditional (Waterfall) planning, enabling context-specific application.
- Proficiency with Jira, including setting up boards and workflows.
- Ability to fluently engage in technical discussions with developers and translate engineering constraints into clear stakeholder communications.
- Certified ScrumMaster (CSM).
- Demonstrated experience managing delivery across multiple concurrent projects or product streams.
- Experience working with cloud platforms (e.g., Azure, AWS, GCP).
There are many roads leading up to being a Senior Project Manager. Not sure you meet 100% of our qualifications? Have an untraditional background? Our team is already a mix of self-taught and formally educated people. Don’t self-select out!
What we offer you:
- You will be a part of a skilled, inspiring, and supportive team, and work in an environment that encourages long term personal growth.
- Flexible, and trust-based work environment with a healthy work life balance.
- Our people come first. That’s why you’ll have access to private medical insurance, employee assistance programmes, group life assurance, income protection and access to a market leading benefits platform.
- Learning & development. We will support you in your growth journey and cover the costs of your role-based certifications.
- We have first hand experience that diversity encourages creativity and innovation and makes us better placed to understand a wider range of customers' needs. This means that whatever your background, you won’t find a more welcoming place to work.
- We have family friendly policies and encourage a work-life balance, including flexible working options in roles which permit it.