Sr. Project Manager

<p><strong>ABOUT THE ROLE:</strong></p> <p>You will play an important role in Accela’s continued growth and success by ensuring the successful, on-time delivery of large and complex Professional Services implementations. As an integral member of a cross-functional team, you will identify key priorities, develop clear execution plans, and partner across the organization to deliver successful outcomes.</p> <p>You will leverage established processes, tools, and templates to manage projects effectively while remaining adaptable to evolving customer needs and business priorities. At the heart of this role is a strong focus on customer value—balancing the needs of our customers and Accela while helping customers maximize the business value they receive from our solutions.</p> <p>At Accela, we believe meaningful work and a positive employee experience go hand in hand. We value collaboration, connection, and a healthy work-life balance.</p> <p>If you are motivated by helping governments better serve their communities through more efficient, open, and innovative technology, we’d love to hear from you.</p> <p><strong>SPECIFIC RESPONSIBILITIES: </strong></p> <p>As the owner of the cross-functional Professional Services delivery process you will make significant impacts on the customer and Accela's business in these key areas:</p> <ul> <li><strong>Project Management: </strong>Manage engagements start-to-finish by applying standard and accepted project management principles; lead project planning and budgeting; mobilize and direct the work streams of cross-functional project teams; champion the Statement of Work; convert scope change into a change order rather than letting the team absorb it silently.</li> <li><strong>Project Health: </strong>Drive on-time and on-budget completion of projects; track project progress and variability; maintain a RAID log - risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies - as the working record; work collaboratively with customer and internal teams to identify risks; develop and execute appropriate risk mitigation strategies within a defined escalation path; implement appropriate tracking and reporting metrics in a manner that provides transparency and visibility into project health; run a weekly budget-burn review - hours consumed against hours contracted, percent complete against percent budget - to surface at-risk engagements early; report on-time go-live rate, budget variance, time-to-go-live and SLA attainment.</li> <li><strong>Tooling and Project Record: </strong>Run your engagements in Jira against the standard implementation project template - consistent epics, issue types, workflow states and a definition of done per phase - rather than a parallel tracker; keep the per-customer space current with environments, contacts, configuration decisions, go-live checklists and retro notes; maintain per-customer dashboards and saved filters so status, aging and blocked items are visible to leadership without a bespoke report; contribute requirements for Jira, GitHub and configuration-repository integration so work is traceable from issue to deployment.</li> <li><strong>Go-Live and Transition: </strong>Own the go-live readiness review; make the handoff into Customer Success and support a defined event with explicit acceptance criteria rather than a fade-out; run a lessons-learned review after every go-live and feed the findings into the implementation playbook.</li> <li><strong>Customer Relationship Management: </strong>Foster an environment of highly effective and collaborative communications in day-to-day interactions with clients and stakeholders; serve as the first point of escalation on the project; support Regional Director in executive steering committees; track customer-side dependenc