Bilingual Infrastructure Project Manager
Role Overview
The Project Manager will lead the end-to-end delivery of complex technology programmes and projects, ensuring achievement of agreed scope, schedule, budget, quality, and business outcomes.
The role requires strong programme delivery, stakeholder management, planning, governance, financial tracking, and risk-management capabilities. The Project Manager will coordinate client stakeholders, internal teams, technical workstreams, vendors, and onshore and offshore delivery teams.
The Project Manager is expected to provide senior delivery leadership, maintain effective client communication, manage escalations, and provide accurate project visibility to executive and steering committee stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities
Programme and Project Delivery
- Lead projects throughout initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, control, transition, and closure.
- Define project objectives, scope, deliverables, milestones, dependencies, and acceptance criteria.
- Develop and maintain integrated project plans using Microsoft Project.
- Coordinate multiple technical and business workstreams to achieve overall programme objectives.
- Establish delivery priorities and ensure alignment among client, business, technical, and operational teams.
- Monitor delivery progress against agreed scope, schedule, cost, quality, and benefits.
- Manage scope changes through formal impact assessment, approval, and governance processes.
- Ensure deliverables are reviewed, approved, and accepted by the relevant stakeholders.
- Lead project transition, operational-readiness, handover, and closure activities.
Planning and Schedule Management
- Develop detailed project plans, work breakdown structures, milestones, and delivery schedules.
- Define task ownership, dependencies, critical paths, and resource requirements.
- Use Microsoft Project, Planner, and Azure DevOps Boards to manage delivery activities.
- Consolidate workstream plans into an integrated programme schedule.
- Monitor schedule performance and identify potential delays or resource constraints.
- Develop recovery plans for delayed or at-risk milestones.
- Coordinate release schedules, deployment activities, change windows, and transition plans.
- Maintain project baselines and track approved schedule changes.
- Ensure project teams provide accurate and timely progress updates.
Stakeholder and Client Management
- Act as the primary delivery interface for client and internal stakeholders.
- Build effective working relationships with executives, business owners, technical leaders, vendors, and delivery teams.
- Facilitate stakeholder meetings, project reviews, workshops, and decision-making forums.
- Communicate progress, risks, dependencies, financial status, and decisions clearly.
- Manage stakeholder expectations and maintain alignment on project priorities and outcomes.
- Resolve cross-functional issues and facilitate decisions when stakeholder priorities conflict.
- Escalate critical risks, delays, financial concerns, and delivery challenges through the agreed governance channels.
- Maintain structured communication between Japan-based stakeholders and offshore teams.
- Ensure that decisions, actions, approvals, and commitments are properly documented and followed through.
Key Responsibilities (continued)
Project Governance
- Establish and maintain the project-governance framework, reporting calendar, and meeting structure.
- Define roles, responsibilities, decision rights, approval authorities, and escalation paths.
- Conduct project status meetings, workstream reviews, steering committees, and executive reviews.
- Prepare governance materials including status reports, dashboards, decision papers, and steering committee presentations.
- Maintain key project records, including actions, decisions, risks, issues, assumptions, and dependencies.
- Ensure compliance with applicable organizational, client, contractual, security, and delivery standards.
- Coordinate required quality reviews, architecture reviews, security assessments, and delivery assurance activities.
- Track governance actions through completion and escalate overdue items.
- Ensure project documentation is complete, controlled, and audit-ready.
Financial and Commercial Management
- Develop and maintain project budgets, forecasts, and financial baselines.
- Track actual expenditure, committed costs, resource costs, and forecast-to-complete.
- Monitor project financial performance and identify budget variances at an early stage.
- Prepare financial dashboards and management reports using Power BI or approved reporting tools.
- Coordinate resource forecasts, staffing plans, purchase requirements, and vendor costs.
- Validate project effort, utilization, time-booking, and billing inputs.
- Work with finance and commercial teams to support invoicing, revenue tracking, and financial reconciliation.
- Assess the financial impact of scope, schedule, resource, or commercial changes.
- Support change-request preparation and commercial impact assessment.
- Escalate significant financial risks and implement corrective-action plans.
Risk, Issue and Dependency Management
- Establish and maintain a structured risk, issue, assumption, and dependency register.
- Facilitate regular risk and issue reviews across project workstreams.
- Assess probability, impact, urgency, ownership, and required mitigation actions.
- Ensure each significant risk and issue has a clear owner and target resolution date.
- Track mitigation and contingency actions through completion.
- Identify cross-project and cross-workstream dependencies that may affect delivery.
- Escalate critical risks and issues within the required governance timeframes.
- Facilitate root-cause analysis for recurring or high-impact delivery problems.
- Maintain contingency and recovery plans for critical project scenarios.
- Communicate risk exposure and trends to leadership and steering committee stakeholders.
Key Responsibilities (continued)
Resource and Team Management
- Develop resource plans covering skills, capacity, location, availability, and timing requirements.
- Coordinate onshore and offshore teams across different functions and time zones.
- Assign responsibilities and establish clear accountability for project deliverables.
- Monitor team capacity and resolve resource conflicts or delivery bottlenecks.
- Coordinate onboarding, access, knowledge transfer, and mobilization of project resources.
- Lead project team meetings and promote effective collaboration across workstreams.
- Provide delivery direction, coaching, and support to workstream leads and project team members.
- Coordinate with resource management and leadership teams to address staffing gaps.
- Promote a culture of ownership, transparency, teamwork, and continuous improvement.
Delivery Monitoring and Reporting
- Track delivery performance using Microsoft Project, Planner, Azure DevOps Boards, and Power BI.
- Develop project dashboards covering schedule, milestones, financials, risks, issues, resources, and actions.
- Provide accurate status reports to client, delivery leadership, and executive stakeholders.
- Use objective evidence and agreed metrics when reporting project health.
- Identify deviations from the approved baseline and initiate corrective actions.
- Maintain a clear view of completed, in-progress, upcoming, delayed, and blocked activities.
- Ensure workstream reporting is timely, consistent, and aligned with programme governance.
- Present project status, decisions required, and recovery actions during steering committee meetings.
Change and Scope Management
- Establish and operate the project change-control process.
- Document proposed scope, schedule, cost, resource, and solution changes.
- Coordinate impact assessments with business, technical, finance, commercial, and delivery teams.
- Present change requests to the appropriate approval authority.
- Update project baselines, plans, budgets, and contractual records following approval.
- Prevent uncontrolled scope expansion and ensure all additional requirements are formally assessed.
- Communicate approved changes and their implications to relevant stakeholders.
Quality, Transition and Project Closure
- Define delivery-quality criteria and completion requirements.
- Ensure deliverables undergo appropriate review, testing, approval, and acceptance.
- Track quality findings, defects, and corrective actions.
- Coordinate operational-readiness, knowledge-transfer, training, and service-transition activities.
- Confirm that support processes, documentation, ownership, and escalation models are in place before handover.
- Obtain formal acceptance of project deliverables.
- Complete project financial, contractual, operational, and administrative closure.
- Conduct lessons-learned sessions and document improvement opportunities.
- Ensure that outstanding risks, issues, and actions are transferred to accountable owners.
Skills
Required Skills
- Strong experience leading complex technology programmes or projects.
- Expertise in programme delivery, project planning, governance, and stakeholder management.
- Hands-on experience with Microsoft Project, Planner, Azure DevOps Boards, and Power BI.
- Strong financial-management skills, including budgeting, forecasting, cost tracking, and variance management.
- Demonstrated experience managing risks, issues, assumptions, dependencies, and changes.
- Experience coordinating cross-functional, onshore, offshore, and vendor teams.
- Strong client-facing communication, negotiation, and executive-presentation skills.
- Ability to manage competing priorities, delivery constraints, and stakeholder expectations.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, decision-making, and escalation-management skills.
- Experience preparing project dashboards, steering committee reports, and executive summaries.
- Knowledge of project lifecycle, quality assurance, transition, and operational-readiness processes.
- Ability to operate effectively in a multicultural and global delivery environment.
Preferred Skills
- Experience delivering cloud, infrastructure, cybersecurity, application migration, or digital-transformation programmes.
- Experience working with Japanese enterprise clients and global delivery teams.
- Business-level Japanese and English communication skills are highly desirable for stakeholder coordination in Tokyo.
- Knowledge of agile, waterfall, and hybrid delivery methodologies.
- Familiarity with Azure cloud and DevOps delivery environments.
- Experience managing third-party vendors, subcontractors, and commercial dependencies.
- Knowledge of IT service management, change management, and service-transition practices.
- Experience using Power BI to create executive-level programme dashboards.
- Exposure to contract management, invoicing, revenue tracking, and change-request commercial processes.
- Strong facilitation, conflict-resolution, and cross-cultural communication capabilities.
Preferred Certifications
- Project Management Professional, or PMP.
- PRINCE2 Practitioner.
- Certified ScrumMaster, Professional Scrum Master, or equivalent agile certification.
- PMI Agile Certified Practitioner.
- SAFe certification.
- ITIL Foundation or an advanced IT service management certification.
Experience and Qualifications
Experience and Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in Business, Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related discipline.
- Substantial experience in project or programme management within technology, consulting, or managed-service environments.
- Proven experience leading complex projects with multiple workstreams, stakeholders, delivery locations, and dependencies.
- Demonstrated ability to independently manage client-facing delivery, governance, financials, risks, and escalations.
- Experience and leadership capability should be aligned with the organization’s D1 band requirements.
Key Deliverables
- Project charter and scope definition.
- Integrated project plan and milestone schedule.
- Resource and capacity plan.
- Project budget, forecast, and financial tracker.
- Stakeholder and communication plan.
- Governance calendar and reporting structure.
- Risk, issue, assumption, and dependency register.
- Project status reports and Power BI dashboards.
- Steering committee and executive-management presentations.
- Change requests and impact assessments.
- Decision and action logs.
- Quality and acceptance records.
- Transition, handover, and operational-readiness plan.
- Project closure report and lessons learned.
Success Measures
- Delivery of agreed scope within approved schedule, budget, and quality parameters.
- Accurate project forecasting and effective financial control.
- Timely identification and resolution of risks, issues, and dependencies.
- Effective governance, decision-making, and escalation management.
- Strong client and stakeholder alignment throughout the project lifecycle.
- Clear and reliable project reporting to leadership and steering committees.
- Effective coordination of Japan-based and offshore delivery teams.
- Controlled management of scope and commercial changes.
- Successful transition of project deliverables into business or operational ownership.
- Completion of project acceptance, closure, and lessons-learned activities.
Tokyo, JP