The Senior Operations Lead will work with the Project Management team and be responsible for developing, guiding, optimizing and ensuring key functional activities are operating efficiently and effectively. Examples of these activities include staffing estimates based on project timelines and work, fee revenue recognition and reporting and technology and tools. As a new role, the Senior Operations Lead will help us develop a consistent approach, set guidelines and ensure adherence from project set up to revenue reporting on an ongoing basis. We also want to automate and leverage technology and tools (e.g. Mavenlink) to help scale these activities and fully support revenue growth. This individual will need a deep understanding of project management and in-depth knowledge of our systems/tools.

Responsibilities

Project Timelines & Tasks

• Ensure consistency of the build out and input of timelines in Mavenlink by rolling out newly created terminology around tasks, deliverables and milestones and other functionality enablement.
• Work with Project Management leadership, and other functional leads, on articulating workflow scenarios and creating new templates to make project delivery more scalable/repeatable.
• Manage the input and adherence for project groups and project custom fields, which drives client-based reporting.
• Assist in the development of new reporting tied to project-level information (e.g. project types, project delivery dates, project revenue) to further enable the Project Management Team and other functions.

Staffing  

• Advise and work with the Project Management team on how to effectively estimate and manage ongoing staffing needs by utilizing technology and tools in the most efficient way.
• Ensure consistency of the approach to input of staffing needs across projects, clients and books of business, and improve the linkage of project staffing to workload/tasks and revenue.
• Reporting on staffing estimates by client relative to revenue projections for future months.

Fee Revenue Recognition & Reporting

• Review and advise on the monthly fee revenue recognition for all project finance sheets reported by the Project Management team.
• Ensure proper project documentation is in place for clients including SOW’s, fee remuneration terms, timekeeping hours, pass through and out of pocket expenses, monthly cutoff, etc.
• Develop and implement internal controls to ensure the consistency and accuracy of monthly fee revenue reporting (e.g. policy and approvals for write-off’s).
• Train and develop the capabilities of the Project Management team on best practices for accurate revenue recognition and reporting.
• Evaluate how we can automate the current approach to the tracking and reporting of revenues to minimize error rates and help us scale efficiently to support revenue growth.
• Escalate compliance issues and determine action plans to address problems.

Technology/Tools & Initiatives

• Lead the ongoing training of existing and evaluation of new technology/tools for the Project Management team.
• Optimize existing technology and tools for the Project Management team (e.g. Mavenlink) and evaluate new technologies to enhance the function.
• Develop a consistent approach to functionality enablement in technology and tools utilized by the Project Management team.
• Assist in the implementation of the Creative Agile methodology and workflows for the Project Management team through collaboration with the Project Management and Creative team leads.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree required.
• Minimum 8 years of total work experience in a project management or operations capacity.
• Background and experience with businesses in the professional services industry.
• Knowledge of project management processes, including resource and financial management.
• Experience with project management software and tools.
• Goal and results oriented, success in managing through change and ambiguity in a fast paced, complex environment.
• Ability to lead and advise individual team members on new processes and procedures that are constantly evolving to meet the needs of a business.
• Consistently work with all roles across the organization, while maintaining a high-level of professionalism.
• Be comfortable working autonomously, and with appropriate authority, to achieve clearly defined goals.