Technical Program Manager, Labs

Company: Western Governors University

Job Location: Salt Lake City Office

Category: IT Manager/Director

Type: Full-Time

Job Type: Full time

Job Number: JR-022962

Location: Salt Lake City Office

If you're passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country-and you're committed to working hard to play your part in building that future-consider WGU as the next step in your career.

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is: Grade: Technical 410 Pay Range: $140,200.00 - $217,200.00

Job Description

Job Duties

• Works collaboratively with other Program Managers, Product Managers, Product Leaders, Senior Engineering Managers, Architects, business, and Ed Tech stakeholders to identify and ensure strategic alignment, track and resolve dependencies, and promote successful conflict resolutions.
• Builds cross program/team relationships.
• Facilitates the implementation of and leads program governance.
• Tracks and reports on program health and delivery progress.
• Implements measurement systems that provide empirical insights into value delivery and opportunities to improve. Limits work in progress and ensures successful commitments and objectives that are outcome and impact based.
• Drives toward continuous operation improvement through analysis of data and inspecting and adapting practices.
• Is bold and data-driven when uncovering and communicating issues.
• Collaborates with Product Managers, Technical Leaders, and other key stakeholders to create and maintain a program roadmap of value-based and outcome-driven deliverables that align tightly with organizational strategy.
• Focuses on communication and documentation of objectives to maximize transparency and alignment.
• Asks the difficult questions that drives the successful delivery of outcomes.
• Actively participates in community development of project and agile roles and the establishment of and adherence to guardrails, policies, and best practices.
• Acts as an agent of change as we strengthen our agile mindset across the organization. Works with Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters to continuously improve agility and foster an environment of self-organization and highly accountable teams.
• Supports teams with meeting their commitments through removal of impediments and facilitation of resolution and action-oriented conversations.
• Works with leadership to establish and facilitate value-add Program Increment (PI) events on a recurring and predictable cadence.
• Performs other job-related duties as assigned.

KSAs

• Adept at coordinating and delivering large and complex solutions that require the coordination of multiple stakeholders, project teams, Scrum teams, Product domains, and vendors.
• Ability to effectively train individuals at all organizational levels and an expert in agile practices and tools.
• Emotionally intelligent and a true leader-who-serves. Is there to help the teams do their best work. Is humble, introspective, and willing to experiment and try new ways of working.
• Skilled at protecting the teams, helping them to focus and accelerate value delivered.
• Demonstrated ability to understand value streams and execute on organizational strategy, translating tactical/technical approaches into user value statements.
• Expert facilitator with a bias for resolution and action over extensive deliberation.
• Demonstrates critical thinking and exhibits excellent judgment.
• Takes pride and ownership over the quality of our products.
• Experienced servant leader, adept at facilitation, situational awareness, conflict resolution, continuous improvement, empowerment, and improvement of organizational transparency.
• Excellent communicator, able to gain the trust of the teams, stakeholders, and leadership.
• Excellent written, oral, presentation, and interpersonal skills.
• Solid understanding of both Agile, Lean, DevOps, and Waterfall methods and principles.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or a related field
• 7 years of relevant experience as a Project Manager, Scrum Master, Release Train Engineer, or Program Manager
• Experience working in traditional and agile environments
• Proficient in tools such as JIRA, Rally, VersionOne, Microsoft Suite, Lucid, etc.
• Experience in managing enterprise level programs
• Experience with SAFe, Scrum@Scale, or other enterprise agile frameworks
• Equivalent relevant experience performing the essential functions of this job may substitute for education degree requirements. Generally, equivalent relevant experience is defined as 1 year of experience for 1 year of education and is the discretion of the hiring manager.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master's Degree in a relevant field
• Experience in higher education, education technology, eLearning development, or relevant field
• Certified Program Manager, SAFe 5 Release Train Engineer, or other enterprise framework
• Experience querying data and building reports using PowerBI, Tableau, or similar tool
• Strong technical understanding and ability to grasp engineering, infrastructure, and security concepts
• Ability to articulate and achieve agile vision through effective organizational change management
• Experience with large systems integrations
• Broad knowledge of project management