Senior Project Manager - Professional Services (Government Enterprise Software)

You will play an important role in Accela’s continued growth and success by ensuring the successful, on-time delivery of large and complex Professional Services implementations. As an integral member of a cross-functional team, you will identify key priorities, develop clear execution plans, and partner across the organization to deliver successful outcomes.

You will leverage established processes, tools, and templates to manage projects effectively while remaining adaptable to evolving customer needs and business priorities. At the heart of this role is a strong focus on customer value—balancing the needs of our customers and Accela while helping customers maximize the business value they receive from our solutions.

At Accela, we believe meaningful work and a positive employee experience go hand in hand. We value collaboration, connection, and a healthy work-life balance.

If you are motivated by helping governments better serve their communities through more efficient, open, and innovative technology, we’d love to hear from you.

SPECIFIC RESPONSIBILITIES:

As the owner of the cross-functional Professional Services delivery process, you will make significant impacts on the customer and Accela’s business in these key areas:

• Project Management: Manage engagements start-to-finish by applying standard and accepted project management principles; lead project planning and budgeting; mobilize and direct the work streams of cross-functional project teams; champion the Statement of Work; convert scope change into a change order rather than letting the team absorb it silently.
• Project Health: Drive on-time and on-budget completion of projects; track project progress and variability; maintain a RAID log (risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies) as the working record; work collaboratively with customer and internal teams to identify risks; develop and execute appropriate risk mitigation strategies within a defined escalation path; implement appropriate tracking and reporting metrics in a manner that provides transparency and visibility into project health; run a weekly budget-burn review (hours consumed against hours contracted, percent complete against percent budget) to surface at-risk engagements early; report on-time go-live rate, budget variance, time-to-go-live, and SLA attainment.
• Tooling and Project Record: Run your engagements in Jira against the standard implementation project template (consistent epics, issue types, workflow states, and a definition of done per phase) rather than a parallel tracker; keep the per-customer space current with environments, contacts, configuration decisions, go-live checklists, and retro notes; maintain per-customer dashboards and saved filters so status, aging, and blocked items are visible to leadership without a bespoke report; contribute requirements for Jira, GitHub, and configuration-repository integration so work is traceable from issue to deployment.
• Go-Live and Transition: Own the go-live readiness review; make the handoff into Customer Success and support a defined event with explicit acceptance criteria rather than a fade-out; run a lessons-learned review after every go-live and feed the findings into the implementation playbook.
• Customer Relationship Management: Foster an environment of highly effective and collaborative communications in day-to-day interactions with clients and stakeholders; serve as the first point of escalation on the project; support Regional Director in executive steering committees; track customer-side dependencies as the real critical path (workflow decisions, record type and Standard Choice sign-off, test participation, approvals, and training scheduling); initiate escalation when a customer is unresponsive or a configuration decision is stuck, rather than leaving the implementer to chase it.
• Cross Functional Teamwork: Lead and support collaboration across many internal stakeholder groups (Consultants, Architects, Project Management Office, Cloud Operations, Product, Support, Partners, and others). On joint Civic Platform and ePermitHub programs, coordinate with the counterpart project manager on dependency mapping, milestone alignment, and shared-risk visibility, and represent the program’s scope in steering meetings.
• Business Development: Support initiatives to grow new business and expand existing projects; participate in aspects of the proposal development process and budget estimation.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Government Enterprise Software - 5 years leading successful implementations of COTS software/platform-based solutions for Tier-1 government clients, or clear evidence of navigating slow, committee-driven stakeholder groups.
• Complex Projects - 5 years leading projects of $1M+ budget, 12+ months duration, and involving more than one government department or group.
• Proven ability to manage multiple complex projects that are at various stages of delivery.
• Comfortable owning budget and burn, and having scope conversations directly with customers.
• Aptitude for understanding and applying new technologies and methodologies.
• BA or BS in a technical discipline, or similar technical degree program.
• Use of formal project management tools (e.g., MS-Project, Visio, etc.).
• Working proficiency in Jira and Confluence, including building boards, dashboards, and saved filters—not only working tickets.
• Strong technical background, with previous experience with delivery of enterprise-class software—enough technical literacy to read a configuration repository and a workflow diagram without needing translation.
• Strong analytical skills and experience managing technical and project management issues.
• Strong organizational skills with an ability to manage competing client demands.
• Ability to interact and communicate with CxO-level personnel.
• Excellent communications and interpersonal skills.
• Ability to travel up to 50% of the time.

DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Project Management Certification - Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) preferred; skilled at identifying the appropriate strategies and tools for planning and tracking complex projects and driving teams to high productivity.
• Permitting and Licensing knowledge desired.