Role: Senior Project Manager / Project Delivery Lead Domain: Banking / Financial Services

Experience:
12+ Years Program: Enterprise Pega Implementation

Location:
Chennai / Hyderabad / Kolkata Role Overview We are looking for a highly experienced, hands-on Senior Project Manager / Project Delivery Lead to lead a complex enterprise technology implementation for a Tier-1 global financial institution. This is not a project coordinator or project administration role. The successful candidate will be accountable for end-to-end delivery governance and must be capable of independently managing project planning, execution, milestones, scope, dependencies, risks, quality, financial/delivery commitments, and client communications. The individual must be highly data-driven, able to identify delivery risks early, maintain an accurate and defensible project position, and confidently lead discussions with senior client and internal stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities
1. End-to-End Project Delivery
• Own overall project delivery across requirements, grooming, development, QA, UAT, release, production deployment, and hypercare.
• Establish and maintain clear project milestones, deliverables, ownership, dependencies, and completion criteria.
• Continuously track baseline vs. actual vs. forecast dates.
• Identify delivery slippage early and establish corrective and recovery actions.
• Ensure commitments made to the client are tracked through completion.
• Drive cross-functional teams toward agreed delivery milestones. 2. Project Planning and Microsoft Project (MPP) – Mandatory
• Demonstrated hands-on expertise in Microsoft Project (MPP) is mandatory.
• Independently create, maintain, and manage detailed end-to-end integrated project plans in Microsoft Project.
• Develop project schedules covering requirements/grooming, development, QA, UAT, release, production deployment, and hypercare.
• Establish and manage project baselines.
• Maintain baseline, actual, and forecast dates throughout project execution.
• Define and manage task dependencies, predecessors/successors, milestones, constraints, and critical paths.
• Regularly update MPP schedules based on actual delivery progress.
• Identify schedule slippage and quantify downstream milestone impacts.
• Build recovery and catch-up plans when delivery deviates from the baseline.
• Model schedule impacts resulting from scope changes, dependencies, resource constraints, and changes in delivery velocity.
• Translate detailed MPP schedules into executive-level milestone views and client-facing delivery plans.
• Ensure alignment between MPP, Jira, RAID/dependency trackers, and client status reporting so that all governance artifacts reflect a consistent delivery position. 3. Data-Driven Project Governance
• Establish and maintain strong project governance and reporting discipline.
• Ensure Jira accurately reflects current project status and delivery progress.
• Reconcile Jira, MPP, project trackers, and client-facing status reports.
• Track planned vs. actual delivery at milestone and workstream levels.
• Ensure scope, story counts, completion percentages, milestone dates,



and forecasts are validated before client reporting.
• Ensure risks, issues, actions, and dependencies have clear owners and target resolution dates.
• Produce fact-based project reporting rather than commentary-based status reporting. Strong reporting discipline is particularly important for this engagement because previous project escalations identified issues around outdated Jira information, missed milestones, and the need for accurate baseline-versus-actual reporting. 4. Risk, Issue, and Dependency Management
• Proactively identify risks before they become delivery or milestone issues.
• Maintain comprehensive RAID and dependency tracking.
• Quantify the schedule and delivery impact of dependencies.
• Establish required-by dates for external and internal dependencies.
• Identify dependencies affecting the project critical path.
• Establish mitigation and contingency plans.
• Escalate risks early with supporting facts and evidence.
• Drive owners to closure rather than simply documenting risks and issues.
• Provide recovery options when milestones are at risk. The existing GS governance model expects at-risk items to have owners and recovery dates, with disciplined treatment of baseline commitments. 5. Client and Executive Stakeholder Management
• Act as a senior delivery representative in client-facing discussions.
• Lead project status, governance, planning, risk, dependency, and escalation discussions.
• Communicate confidently with senior client and internal stakeholders.
• Present complex delivery situations clearly and concisely.
• Ensure escalations are supported by accurate project data and evidence.
• Professionally challenge assumptions where project data supports a different conclusion.
• Maintain clear documentation of decisions, commitments, assumptions, and actions.
• Build and maintain client confidence through transparency, accuracy, and proactive communication. 6. Scope and Change Control
• Maintain strong control over project scope, particularly within a fixed-price/fixed-budget engagement.
• Maintain clear scope baselines.
• Prevent uncontrolled scope expansion.
• Identify and document changes affecting scope, timeline, effort, or delivery commitments.
• Quantify the schedule and resource impacts of proposed changes.
• Maintain appropriate change and decision logs.
• Ensure material changes follow agreed change-control processes.
• Clearly differentiate between defects, requirements clarifications, enhancements, and change requests. The underlying GS engagement documentation specifically requires material changes to scope or timeline to be mutually agreed and documented. 7. QA, UAT, and Release Governance
• Work closely with QA, engineering, architecture,



and business teams to establish measurable readiness criteria.
• Track QA and UAT progress against the project baseline.
• Ensure defects and testing dependencies are accurately reported.
• Monitor defect trends and their impact on milestones.
• Track QA automation progress where applicable.
• Drive timely resolution of UAT blockers.
• Ensure regression testing and release-readiness activities are incorporated into the overall plan.
• Ensure go-live decisions are based on objective delivery and quality information. 8. Governance and Status Reporting Own preparation and execution of project governance activities, including:
• Daily delivery checkpoints
• Start-of-Day / End-of-Day reviews where applicable
• Weekly project status meetings
• RAID and dependency reviews
• Milestone reviews
• Release-readiness reviews
• Client governance meetings
• Steering Committee updates
• Executive escalations
• Recovery-plan reviews Status reporting must be data-driven, concise, current, and supported by underlying delivery evidence. Required Skills and Experience
• 8+ years of overall technology delivery/project management experience.
• 5+ years managing complex enterprise software implementations.
• Demonstrated experience managing projects within banking or financial services.
• Demonstrated experience managing fixed-price or fixed-scope engagements.
• Robust hands-on knowledge of Microsoft Project (MPP).
• Demonstrated ability to independently create and maintain complex integrated project schedules.
• Strong knowledge of project baselining, critical-path management, dependencies, forecasting, milestones, and recovery planning.
• Strong hands-on experience with Jira and Agile project delivery.
• Strong experience with RAID management, scope/change control, dependency management, forecasting, and project governance.
• Ability to manage requirements, development, QA, UAT, release, and production-readiness workstreams simultaneously.
• Experience managing geographically distributed offshore/onshore teams.
• Proven ability to lead project status and escalation discussions with senior client stakeholders.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to operate independently with limited senior-management intervention.
• Highly organized with exceptional attention to project data accuracy and delivery commitments. Preferred Skills
• PMP, PRINCE2 Practitioner, PMI-ACP, or equivalent project management certification.
• Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), PSM, or equivalent Agile certification.
• Pega implementation/delivery experience.
• PCBA certification or strong functional understanding of Pega.
• Pega Smart Investigate / Smart Investigate Agentic Automation experience.
• Banking payments experience.
• Knowledge of SWIFT, ISO 20022, Fedwire, and payment investigation/exception-management processes.
• Previous experience delivering major technology programs for Tier-1/global financial institutions.
• Experience managing regulated enterprise production releases.

📌 Senior Project Manager (Chennai)
🏢 EvonSys
📍 Chennai