Senior Project Manager

As a trusted global transformation partner, Welocalize accelerates the global business journey by enabling brands and companies to reach, engage, and grow international audiences. Welocalize delivers multilingual content transformation services in translation, localization, and adaptation for over 250 languages with a growing network of over 400,000 in-country linguistic resources. Driving innovation in language services, Welocalize delivers high-quality training data transformation solutions for NLP-enabled machine learning by blending technology and human intelligence to collect, annotate, and evaluate all content types. Our team works across locations in North America, Europe, and Asia serving our global clients in the markets that matter to them. www.welocalize.com

To perform this job successfully, an individual must be able to perform each essential duty satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of the knowledge, skill, and/or ability required. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

The Senior Project Manager serves as a main point of contact between Welocalize and the client, streamlining and enhancing communication between client lab staff, onsite Vendor Project Managers (part of our extended team) and the Welocalize internal team (back office and recruiting). They work with the client to optimize resource planning and allocation, with the ultimate goal of ensuring client satisfaction. They work closely with the Recruiting Manager and recruiting team to staff open positions for the accounts, communicating frequently to help them understand the clients’ short- and long-term needs and requirements.

The Senior Project Manager will work closely with the Operations Manager/Specialist, provide guidance to the testing teams and onsite Vendor Project Managers, and liaise with People Success team to ensure that all aspects of the project run smoothly and successfully, including bookings, scheduling, billing and invoicing, team performance, growth and motivation.

·       Manage existing accounts. This includes working with key client contacts and Welocalize's VPMs to hire additional project-based employees, ensure that projects are executed successfully, address performance concerns, make changes to the team, implement onsite policies, and support the overall direction of the relationship.

·       Understand client expectations and communicate effectively to appropriate parties. 

·       Monitor and communicate with client on agreed KPIs/OKRs and data analytics on a timely manner. Organize QBRs to present highlights, challenges of the previous quarter and innovative solutions to implement.

·       Serve as first point of escalation for Welocalize regarding any issues arising for the client, VPMs or testers. Actively seek feedback from the client about the team's performance at all labs, discussing areas of improvement, and devising and enforcing plans of action to obtain improved results. 

·       Meet with the client to discuss and clarify briefs, policies and requests, deadlines, resource planning and allocation. 

·       Act as a main line of communication between the client/lab staff and Welocalize management/recruiters. 

·       Report to Welocalize management about onsite activities, team performance, client feedback, requests and policy changes, short- and long-term planning. 

·       Manage onsite resources, in close collaboration with the onsite project management team (VPMs).  

·       Work with the onsite PMs to coordinate testing efforts and schedule resources for projects in all labs/locations to most effectively meet the client’s needs and goals, keep testing schedules on track, preempt or respond to issues that may arise onsite, and make sure HR is notified as appropriate. 

·       Gather information and feedback from individual VPMs at all labs about the testers' performance, workload management, and any issues encountered while performing their duties.  Provide training, coaching and guidance to address performance concerns and improve speed and quality of testers’ work. 

·       Support and advise the VPMs in addressing issues regarding testers' professional interaction with other testers within the team or from another vendor's team, with client lab staff or other employees. 

·       Promote team-building activities such as after-work gatherings or recognition of special occasions for testers. 

·       Hold weekly meetings with onsite project management team and with recruiters as needed.

·       Conduct performance reviews with onsite employees and VPMs.  

·       Work seamlessly with recruiting team, HR and Operations Manager to successfully onboard new employees and terminate employees who are leaving the project – in accordance with all Welocalize HR guidelines and SOPs. 

·       Notify HR if an employee has special needs or is taking medical/disability/parental leave. 

·       Support staffing and retention efforts, developing and motivating contract team members, monitoring performance feedback and conducting disciplinary actions as needed.  

·       Keep VPMs up-to-date with changes in Welocalize structure and management to enable VPMs to direct testers to the appropriate contacts for questions related to HR, payroll, compensation, etc. 

·       Compile and maintain standard operating procedures (SOPs) for VPMs and for handover purposes at peer level.

·       Manage all recruiting efforts, in close collaboration with the recruiting team. Activities include: inform recruiters about immediate and anticipated language needs, upcoming projects, the status of submitted candidates or testers in training, receive new candidates from recruiters and make decisions to bring them in for an assessment/interview or present them to the client.  

·       Track monthly and yearly revenue forecasting and gross margin attainment. 

·       Budget and monitor payroll for contractors and temporary workforce.  

·       Handle billing and invoicing: submitting billing summaries to the client for approval; opening and closing projects in the dedicated platform; getting invoices issued from the accounting team and sent to the client; providing monthly, quarterly, yearly forecasts, etc.  

·       Work closely with Operations Squad Lead and Strategic Account Manager regarding overall strategy, business direction, forecasts and opportunities for the account.  

·       Bachelor's degree in language, linguistics, HR, management, or related field, or equivalent work experience (min. 2+ years’ experience in the QA, localization or globalization industry)

·       At least 7 years of prior professional experience, preferably 3 years in the staffing industry  

·       Natural leader who easily gains respect from and motivates team members

·       Strong knowledge of recruiting best practices and the staffing/contracting environment  

·       Knowledge of HR best practices and conflict resolution 

·       Experience in a client-facing role where exemplary customer service was practiced 

·       Proven ability to build and maintain strong client relationships based on trust and credibility  

·       Experience managing seven figure relationships with a history of exceeding quota 

·       Extreme attention to detail and great organizational skills, with ability to efficiently manage multiple tasks and project deadlines in a time-sensitive and deadline-driven work environment 

·       Ability to see the big picture and think strategically

·       High level of integrity and ability to handle information with discretion, discerning when confidentiality is important

·       Genuine team player who puts team first

·       High level of responsibility, ownership and accountability

·       Conflict management and mediation skills

·       Ability to stay calm under pressure and when facing conflicting demands from various stakeholders

·       Ability to address groups of 10-100

·       Excellent command of written and spoken English

·       Keen sense of judgment when prioritizing tasks and managing delivery of communications

·       Experience providing trainings to people individually and in groups, in technical and other skills

·       Ability to present complex tasks in a simple and clear manner

·       Experience with Data Analytics and agile methodology

·       People management experience  

·       Ability to connect easily with colleagues and managers (both Welocalize and client) in a very diverse setting

·       Ability to communicate effectively with client company managers, linguists, onsite and offsite project managers, and testers across all vendors and language groups    

·       Ability to troubleshoot and come up with solutions on the spot in a fast-paced, demanding environment

·       Fluency in working with numbers and spreadsheets 

·       Available to travel occasionally for work-related commitments

·       Experience in accounting, financial management and budgets  

·       Ability to manage resources and related costs, with a good business sense 

·       Experience in development of processes and ideas  

·       Curiosity and creativity to question existing processes/approaches and innovate new ones 

·       Ability to actively drive projects with a positive impact 

·       Demonstrated success at managing large accounts and/or projects 

·       Tech savviness

·       In-depth knowledge of OS X, iOS, iWork, iCloud, iTunes, Windows, MS Office

·       Knowledge of another language other than English at native speaker level is a plus

·       Project management experience and/or training

·       Multilingual

·       Knowledge of basic HTML and Unicode

·       Basic computer networking knowledge (setting up IP addresses, connecting devices using proxy, etc.)

·       Experience writing and editing QA plans

·       Familiarity with photo editing and desktop publishing

·       Training in conflict resolution or mediation

·       Must be able to be in a stationary position for extended periods of time

·       Must be able to use a computer mouse for extended periods of time 

·       Must be able to keyboard for extended periods of time

·       Position may be exposed to content that could be construed as offensive, including but not limited to sexual, health related, racial or violent. 

·       Will be exposed to a computer monitor/screen for extended periods of time

·       This position may be exposed to content that could be construed as offensive, including but not limited to sexual, health related, racial or violent.