IT PROJECT MANAGER (PROJECT/NON-PERMANENT)

The University of Washington (UW) is proud to be one of the nation’s premier educational and research institutions. Our people are the most important asset in our pursuit of achieving excellence in education, research, and community service. Our staff not only enjoys outstanding benefits and professional growth opportunities, but also an environment noted for diversity, community involvement, intellectual excitement, artistic pursuits, and natural beauty.

At the University of Washington, diversity is integral to excellence. We value and honor diverse experiences and perspectives, strive to create welcoming and respectful learning environments, and promote access, opportunity and justice for all.

The Information Technology team at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) at the University of Washington is hiring – see yourself at APL!

APL has an outstanding opportunity open for an IT Project Manager (Project Position/Non-Permanent).

The Applied Physics Laboratory is a research unit at the University of Washington. Our research expertise is in ocean physics and engineering, ocean and medical acoustics, polar science, environmental remote sensing, and signal processing. We conduct research and development that is sponsored by a variety of federal and state agencies, and take great pride in our long-standing status as a US Navy-designated University Affiliated Research Center (UARC). Our work takes place not only on the University of Washington campus and medical centers, but in field locations around the world – at sea, in the air, and on polar ice caps. We apply rigorous scientific inquiry and engineering excellence in pursuit of solutions to important problems for the good of our region, nation, and world.

Diversity is a core value at University of Washington and the Applied Physics Laboratory shares this commitment. We are focused on building and sustaining an inclusive and equitable research environment for all students, staff, and collaborators. We believe every member on our team enriches our community by exposing us to a broad range of ways to understand and engage with the world, identify challenges, and to discover, design and deliver solutions.

The successful candidate in this position will provide project management support for a number of concurrently running information technology (IT) projects, thereby supporting the overall IT program at the Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington.  The incumbent will perform project planning at the outset of projects, in coordination with the other IT team members, including overall scope definition, individual task definition in work breakdown structures, resource allocation across tasks and projects, and scheduling of individual tasks in order to predict overall project completion times.  In coordination with the IT team, they will identify risk items and corresponding mitigation measures and maintain these in a project risk register.  The incumbent will track effort applied to tasks and projects, and will also track other project related costs such as hardware procurements and software licenses.  They will be responsible to the technical IT project leaders for reporting on project progress and identifying any schedule or cost deviations, as well as any other issues that arise, so that mitigation measures can be implemented and projects completed on schedule and within allocated budget.

The candidate will work closely with IT Managers to understand operation support staff’s bandwidth and account for operational tasks in order to ensure IT staff can meet customer IT service expectations while successfully completing projects for new initiatives.

The ideal candidate will have had a background in one or more components of IT operations who have since transitioned into IT Project Management. This knowledge will help the incumbent not only successfully lead projects, it will ensure they can aid stakeholders in making technical decisions, help with the technical design and point out areas for process improvement and/or automation. This may mean the right candidate will have spent time as a system administrator, network or platform engineer, configuration manager or other area of discipline before moving into the project management area of work.

Duties and Responsibilities:

Project Management Support:

Work with members of the APL IT team to:

• Create, organize, and maintain required project documentation.  Build common processes to ensure consistency across projects.
• Define IT projects that will benefit the APL-UW mission.
• Define and document the scope of proposed projects.
• For each project, generate a work breakdown structure (WBS) that encompasses scope.
• Allocate available resources to WBS items.
• Plan the temporal evolution of project tasking to generate project plans and schedules.
• Identify project risks and appropriate mitigation procedures.  Document these in a risk register.

During Project Execution:

• Track effort and other costs associated with project tasks.
• Track task and project completion status.
• Generate reports of accumulated cost and project status.
• Communicate issues with schedule, cost, or quality as projects are executed.
• Work with project leaders to address issues and adjust planning as appropriate.

At Project Conclusion:

• Generate reporting on final project output with associated cost and quality assessment.
• Document lessons learned.

Specialized IT Support:

• Learn about overall APL-UW IT infrastructure and IT support requirements.
• Depending on level of IT experience, the ideal candidate may have:
o Experience diagnosing, repairing and documenting corrective action for mechanical, hardware, software and system failures.
o Experience designing and deploying functional networks (LAN, WLAN, WAN) to include installing software, servers, routers, and other network devices with the ability to recommend design enhancements to internal management and engineering.
o Experience monitoring network performance and integrity with the ability to communicate improvements for network performance, capacity, and scalability.
o Experience automating tasks and monitoring completed tasks for effectiveness.
o Experience serving as top tier support for troubleshooting local infrastructure.

Requirements:

Bachelor’s degree in an information technology field and five or more years of combined professional experience in a project coordination role with three of the years as the lead project manager.

• Specific experience in management of IT projects.
• US Citizenship.
• Ability to acquire and maintain a Department of Defense (DoD) security clearance.
• Solid organizational and analytical skills that are demonstrated by the ability to conceptualize and create qualitative and/or quantitative real-time, project narratives resulting in metrics that speak to milestone/gate progress and simultaneously, present on the overall project portfolio in a way that drives stakeholder and leadership risk-based decisions.
• Strong proficiency with one or more project management toolsets.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• High acumen for collaboration tools like MS Office.
• Experience with developing and tracking project-related budgets.
• Experience managing multiple projects and workload to meet deadlines and deliverables.
• Ability to both work independently and as part of a diverse set of team members.

Equivalent education/experience will substitute for all minimum qualifications except when there are legal requirements, such as a license/certification/registration.

The person hired into position must be a U.S. citizen and successfully obtain and continue to maintain a Department of Defense (DOD) Personnel Security Clearance. The process for obtaining a DOD Security Clearance can be view using the following links: Processing Applicants (dcsa.mil) or General Investigations and Clearance Processes (dcsa.mil) .

Desired:

•     Project Management Professional (PMP) or other recognized project management certification.

•     Proficiency with GitLab.

•     Experience with IT Operations platform support (Windows, macOS, Linux).

•     Experience with designing and implementing enterprise IT solutions.

Application Process:

The application process for UW positions may include completion of a variety of online assessments to obtain additional information that will be used in the evaluation process.  These assessments may include Work Authorization, Cover Letter, and/or others.  Any assessments that you need to complete will appear on your screen as soon as you select “Apply to this position”. Once you begin an assessment, it must be completed at that time; if you do not complete the assessment you will be prompted to do so the next time you access your “My Jobs” page. If you select to take it later, it will appear on your "My Jobs" page to take when you are ready. Please note that your application will not be reviewed, and you will not be considered for this position until all required assessments have been completed.