Program Manager

Roles & Responsibilities • Own the end-to-end program charter, objectives, and success criteria for the modernization initiative. • Establish and run governance structures – steering committees, program working groups, and architecture review boards. • Serve as the primary point of contact for executive sponsors, business owners, and technology leadership. • Ensure alignment with enterprise strategy, architecture standards, and regulatory/compliance requirements. • Define and manage overall program scope across all workstreams • Break down the program into projects, milestones, and sprint plans, coordinating dependencies across teams. • Drive release planning and cutover planning (mock runs, dress rehearsals, freeze windows, rollback). • Proactively identify and manage program risks and issues (technology, resourcing, scope, dependencies, vendor constraints). • Maintain and socialize risk registers, mitigation plans, and contingency strategies. • Own program financials: estimates, budget tracking, staffing plans, and change requests. • Ensure commercial obligations (SLAs, SOW milestones, deliverables, acceptance criteria) are met and documented. • Build strong relationships with business and technology stakeholders across data, analytics, operations, and compliance. • Facilitate workshops and working sessions to clarify requirements, refine scope, and gain alignment on migration priorities. • Provide clear, concise status reporting at all levels: o Executive dashboards and steering committee packs. o Detailed project status for PMO and technical leads. • Manage expectations around timelines, risks, and trade-offs, particularly for production cutovers and high-visibility workloads. Experience : • 15+ years leading large-scale data modernization, insurance transformation, or enterprise reporting programs with multiple parallel workstreams. • Proven experience managing fixed-fee / milestone-based delivery across architecture, ingestion, transformation, reporting, testing, and hypercare. • Strong track record coordinating business, IT, Guidewire program teams, data SMEs, security, infrastructure, and vendor partners. • Experience driving executive governance, RAID management, dependency tracking, financial control, change management, and steering committee reporting. • Familiarity with hybrid agile delivery, release planning, sprint governance, and phased cutover aligned to major platform go-lives.