Manager of Agency Projects

Job Description

We have a direct-hire position for a Manager of Agency Projects with one of our clients in Duluth, GA. No third party candidates considered for this position.

The Manager of Agency Projects oversees business and quality assurance analysts and acts as the liaison between the life insurance agency team, business stakeholders and the various programming teams within and outside of Client. Projects include maintaining, modifying and improving Client’s agency and compensation systems for our production team, assisting in the creation and implementation applications used by the Client business team and sale force, identifying and resolving systematic issues and generating related ad hoc reports. In addition to supervising the various projects assigned to the team, the Manager will be expected to be involved in numerous internal and external projects as needed.

This team supports the systems that pay Client sales representatives field compensation and equity awards, a critical component of Client’s business model. Supporting these systems with a small team requires individuals who believe in teamwork, are resourceful and who can leverage new ideas and technology to create efficiencies for the production team.

The ideal candidate will have leading experience as this position is responsible for managing the activities of the team members, as well as working closely with senior stakeholders across the organization.  Providing verbal and written feedback to team members designed to improve and acknowledge performance is also required. Knowledge and/or certification in various applications such as MS Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Teams), SQL, Power BI for data analytics & reporting, Confluence, Test Rail, and JIRA is highly desirable.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:

• Oversees daily functions and project time management of reporting employees, Delegates and assign new projects and task to the team
• Acts as a liaison between business and IT team to implement programming changes
• Planning and managing projects to ensure they are completed in a timely fashion and within budget (if applicable)
• Plans and designates project resources, prepares budgets (if applicable) and keeps stakeholders informed the entire way
• Ensures that projects meet outlined objectives
• Ensures workflow within the teams meets departmental production and quality standards
• Host stakeholder meetings to meets with business users, Vice President, Senior Vice President and/or Executive Vice President to discuss user requests and priorities
• Participates in management discussions and decisions
• Makes recommendations to management concerning department changes, improvements, enhancements and benefits
• Ensures that the project teams comply with all compliance policies and procedures
• Gathers accurate work estimates from the development team, and other applicable areas, for projects and features and challenges the team, where appropriate, to ensure that estimates are realistic
• Responsible for managing the programming function to reduce the dollar outlay for outside programming expertise, recoding of existing programs, and development of new programs
• Works with shared services and back-end development teams and/or 3rd party developers to ensure successful delivery
• Analyze company, business or team needs and provide technical solutions to new and existing problems and/or issues
• Be able to answer questions from other teams and give feedback on how to incorporate Agency system more efficiently and effectively
• Drives collaboration across internal platform development teams to ensure that features and implementations for each platform remain in sync
• Responsible for handling all upgrades to software and hardware related to Agency Projects and Systems
• Performs any necessary research and training for any system modification or upgrades
• Ensures that systems are working properly and works with the appropriate personnel to resolve any issues
• Resolves system issues. Handle multiple priorities simultaneously
• Addresses internal and external technical risks, issues, roadblocks, and dependencies
• Escalates appropriately, especially when timelines could be impacted
• Escalate challenges that cannot be addressed at the project level to leadership team on a timely basis
• Develop knowledge of the systems and processes of the departments and business functions Agency Team support
• Determines potential effects of project on other user areas
• Has responsibility for recruiting staff, developing talent and building an effective team
• Assists with establishing procedures and standards for the team
• Able to work independently with more limited direction from management.
• Handle multiple priorities simultaneously
• Assists vendors in ensuring projects completed