Project Manager II

The Information Management Services Division provides technology, systems, and services to help fulfill the goals of CDE. Information Management Services supports CDE and Colorado School Districts through five interwoven teams: Network/Help Desk; Programming and Reporting, Data Services/Collections, Project Management and Data Privacy. The Project Management Office (PMO) provides business analysis, project management and some quality assurance services for technical projects for CDE, CDE divisions or CDE units.

Position Summary:
The purpose of this position is to facilitate the delivery of projects critical to CDE and all the districts it supports. This role is to lead and manage business requirements, change management processes, project management and quality assurance testing for multiple CDE projects.

The individual in this role, is expected to become the subject matter expert (SME) for each project to which they are assigned. The individual in this role may serve as BA, PM, QA tester as well as a leader, a coach, and a product owner throughout the project lifecycle.

This individual will become the senior authority in their area of expertise and may be asked to attend and speak in depth to any audience. This position will be expected to provide options, recommendations, risks, and rewards when consulted especially and provide project summary and details for senior and executive decision making.

This position will work closely with all levels of staff including executives, managers, and individual contributors. Additionally, with all levels, the employee will need to negotiate deadlines and provide status updates.

Duties and Responsibilities

Project Management:

• Provides project management support for projects as needed. This includes support through the entire life cycle of the project. Including processes and artifacts as needed by the project.
• Acts as liaison between the IMS technical team and business unit subject matter experts, bridging the gap between technology and business language.
• Implements a comprehensive management plan for designated projects and hold regular stakeholder meetings to keep all interested parties updated on project progress.
• Serves as the BA, project manager, QA tester for projects.
• Understands the importance of being a subject matter expert for each project they may be assigned to
• Serves as product owner in the absence of a customer product owner and coaches the customers to serve in a product owner role as needed.
• Evaluates and determines based on the size and complexity of a project which artifacts need to be created including a mitigation plan, a project schedule, a communication plan, project templates, and user testing and process mapping plans.
• Understands the projects and the engagement with stakeholders well enough to communicate the significance and details on behalf of the business contact and competent enough to translate their needs to the technicians.
• Communicates their understanding of the technology with the technical team to provide detailed requirements.

Quality Assurance / Test Documents and Testing:

• Evaluates business rules and requirements, write test documents; test plans, test cases, and test reports for all phases of testing including functional, regression, integration, and user acceptance tests.
• Performs manual testing and build reusable test automation for future use
• Manages the issue tickets and assign them to the appropriate developer
• Helps troubleshoot issues by using tools such as TOAD and SQL
• Creates detailed test plans, tests cases and document the results of testing
• Performs quality assurance testing
• Assists and guide the end user to participate in user acceptance tests

Further Duties and Responsibilities:

• Gathers requirements using interviews, document analysis, requirements workshop, surveys, business process descriptions, use case development and scenarios, business analysis tasks, and workflow analysis
• Assesses the viability of each (non-legislated) project. Develop high level requirements and recommendations for executive approval
• Evaluates, documents, and presents options for satisfying all project requests
• Gathers business requirements from all business units and document business functions, process flows and maintain current documentation of detailed workflow diagrams, narratives, and intersections between the various user groups.
• Translates business and/or functional requirements into technical, system, and reporting requirements as needed and identify business trends utilizing real or representative data, compile analysis reports and deliver to the technical leadership team
• Considers and implement process changes where needed within IMS and make process improvement recommendations as appropriate for broader solution design
• Reports on common sources of business and technical issues or questions and make recommendations for improvement.
• Invests time into understanding education data, work with CDE business units to become familiar with the appropriate and legislated usage of student and educator data.
• Leads data modeling design sessions to assist with accurately defining requirements defined by the business users
• Creates direct channels of communication to data warehouse and application developers that get the job done with minimal managerial interjection
• Be able to work within different types of Software Development Lifecycle Methodologies, agile and waterfall, understanding that the majority of CDE’s products are focused heavily on data. Reporting of data is key to our operations, so facilitating requirements generation and documentation in a very fast and “real-time” manner is expected.
• Analyzes functional specs and design documents and work directly with sponsors, customer stakeholders, project managers, developers, and end-user groups to ensure software functionality and technical design requirements are met.
• Develops comprehensive business and technical requirements suitable for the audience (technical/business).
• Works with the development team, assist, as needed, in translating complex and technical requirements into a design document and review documents to determine if a project is viable.