D365 Project Manager, Managed Services

Location Virtual, home based office with travel

Description

The MCA Connect Project Manager in this role carries a blended portfolio. You will manage day to day support for live Dynamics 365 clients under Managed Services (MgS), manage the discrete enhancement and new functionality work those same clients buy, and direct one or more full life-cycle Dynamics 365 implementations from diagnosis through go-live and transition into support.

These three types of work are genuinely different disciplines.

• MgS live support is a queue to be managed against service commitments.
• New functionality and enhancement work is a series of small, fixed-scope projects that must be estimated, scheduled and billed without disturbing the support commitment.
• A full life-cycle implementation is a large, multi-phase program with its own team, budget and executive visibility.

The person in this role must be able to manage all three at once, switch cleanly between them, and protect each from the others.

You will be supported by a strong delivery team of solution architects, functional and technical consultants, and developers, but you will need a strong background in project management and business process optimization, and either a solid working knowledge of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform or the capacity to build one quickly. Our projects are strategic investments for our clients. Their successful execution and their ongoing support both require a project manager who is driven, proactive, creative, assertive and relationship oriented.

While your primary function is project management, from time to time you may also be asked to assist with other functions including sales and marketing, implementation-related tasks, and general administration.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities below are grouped into the disciplines common to every engagement, then the three work streams in turn, then the financial, communication and practice duties that run across all of them. Each group opens with what the work is and why it matters, followed by the specific tasks the role owns.

Core project management, all work streams

A set of project management disciplines applies to every engagement you carry, whatever its size or commercial shape.

• Manage multiple concurrent client engagements, and own deliverables, scope and expectations on each of them.
• Provide leadership to all functional and business areas affected by the work.
• Develop and maintain project plans, cost estimates, resource plans, communication plans, risk mitigation plans and issue resolution plans.
• Drive project decisions and make recommendations to management about schedules, prioritization and resource allocation.
• Work with MCA Connect resource management to secure resources, and resolve the challenges between support needs, enhancement commitments and other milestones.
• Employ project management leading practices as provided by PMI and MCA Connect delivery standards.
• Drive client satisfaction across the portfolio and own the health relationship of every account you carry.

MgS live support clients

For an assigned portfolio of live Dynamics 365 clients, the work is a managed queue rather than a plan: tickets arrive on their own schedule to a support queue, and your job is to see that they are triaged correctly, worked by the right consultant, resolved inside the contracted commitment, and visible to the client throughout. Alongside the queue you monitor consumption against contract in period and raise the conversation about overage or change before the period closes rather than after.

• Own the service relationship for each assigned live client and act as their main point of accountability.
• Manage the client’s service desk tickets: triage, prioritization, assignment, aging, escalation and closure.
• Balance case load across the available consultant pool and keep the queue from concentrating on one person.
• Run regular service reviews covering ticket volumes and trends, consumption against the retainer or hours block, open risks and the forward plan.
• Manage environment optimization and management activities, including release and update readiness for Microsoft's service update cadence, environment refreshes and performance reviews.
• Monitor consumption against contract in period and flag over-consumption and under-consumption early.
• Drive the conversation about overage, carry-over or contract change before the period closes.
• Convert recurring incidents and chronic pain points into problem records, root cause work or scoped enhancement proposals.
• Maintain accurate case records, time capture and status in Symphony so reporting, invoicing and utilization figures reconcile without manual correction.
• Receive projects transitioning in from the implementation team and confirm documentation, environments, known issues and open items all transferred.

New functionality and enhancement delivery

Live clients regularly buy work that is not support. Further work could be a customization, implement a new D365 module, an integration change, a business process review, or a training package. Each of these is a small project in its own right. The recurring tension in this stream is resource: enhancement work and the support queue draw on the same consultants, and you are expected to schedule around that rather than let one quietly starve the other.

• Qualify incoming requests, distinguish enhancements from support incidents, and route each to the right resources.
• Coordinate estimation with solution architects and consultants, and produce the scope, effort, schedule and price the client will approve.
• Secure written client approval of scope, cost and schedule before work begins.
• Schedule enhancement work packages against the same resource pool that carries the support queue, and protect the support commitment when the two compete.
• Manage each enhancement through design confirmation, build, test, client acceptance, deployment and post-deployment care.
• Coordinate deployment windows, regression testing and release notes with the client.
• Confirm enhancement releases align with Microsoft platform updates.
• Confirm each enhancement is documented and handed into the support model at completion.

Full life-cycle Dynamics implementation projects

You will direct one or more end-to-end Dynamics 365 implementations, typically 3 to 16 months long with 5 to 10 multi-disciplined team members across one or more client locations. These are major strategic investments for our clients and carry executive visibility on both sides, so the role is a directive one: you own the integrated plan and the critical path, you chair the steering committee, and you are expected to drive decisions rather than report on them. A large share of the risk sits outside your own team, in client-side decisions, data readiness, integration counterparties and testing capacity, and managing those dependencies is part of the job rather than an excuse when they slip. The project is not finished at go-live; it is finished when it is running in support with the knowledge transferred.

• Direct the implementation across all phases: Diagnosis, Analysis, Design, Development, Deployment and Operation and various Business Process Areas.
• Own the integrated project plan, the critical path, and the milestone and deliverable schedule.
• Manage scope formally through change control, including the financial and schedule consequence of every approved change.
• Coordinate the client-side workstreams the project which depends on: business process decisions, data readiness and cleansing, integration counterparties, testing resource, training and organizational change.
• Drive go-live planning and cutover activities, including cutover rehearsal, go and no-go criteria, contingency and rollback, and hypercare staffing.
• Produce the executive-level for client Steering Committee meetings.
• Transition the completed implementation into MgS with the support model, documentation, environment inventory, open defect list and knowledge transfer all in place.

Qualifications

We are looking for a project manager who has run both project work and ongoing service delivery, because the blend is what makes this role difficult. Depth in Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a strong advantage. The non-negotiable is the ability to hold several clients at once without losing control of any of them.

• 4 or more years of experience directly managing software implementation deployments. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (ERP) or Customer Engagement (CRM) is a strong plus.
• Demonstrated experience managing both project-based delivery and ongoing support or managed services delivery, ideally at the same time.
• Experience with IT implementation methodologies across all phases of Diagnosis, Analysis, Design, Development, Deployment and Operation.
• Understanding industry standard Business Process Areas is a plus.
• Demonstrated ability to manage competing priorities across multiple concurrent clients.
• Good planning, organizational and problem-solving skills.
• Strong business acumen, including comfort with budgets, forecasts, and contract terms.
• Ability to work closely with key business stakeholders to communicate progress and vision.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Ability to allocate the correct resources to each project phase and monitor their performance.
• Strong leadership, teambuilding and motivational skills.
• Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Ability to travel up to 50 percent of the time.

Desired Qualifications

• One or more full life-cycle Microsoft Dynamics implementations delivered end to end.
• Experience with the wider Microsoft platform of technologies.
• ERP implementation lead experience in the manufacturing industry.
• Experience with service management practice, including ITIL-aligned incident, problem and change management.
• PMI certification.
• Microsoft certification on the Dynamics 365 platform.
• Mastery of industry-standard project management tools.

Originally posted on Himalayas