Senior IT Project Manager - M&A / Life Sciences
Remote
Job Summary
This position extends beyond traditional project management. Individual application initiatives may be managed by a dedicated project manager, business lead, application owner, or functional stakeholder. The successful candidate will work effectively across these different delivery models, providing IT governance and oversight, assessing transition readiness, identifying gaps and dependencies, coordinating required technology activities, facilitating knowledge acquisition, and diving into application-level details when required to drive successful outcomes.
The ideal candidate will combine strong project and program management discipline with hands-on experience in enterprise application delivery, business engagement, transition management, stakeholder coordination, and M&A/carve-out environments.
Key Responsibilities
Application Transition Leadership & IT Oversight
- Serve as the primary IT lead and point of accountability for an assigned portfolio of application transition, separation, migration, and implementation initiatives.
- Ensure each assigned application has clearly defined business and IT ownership, an appropriate project or transition workplan, accountable delivery leadership, and a defined path to implementation, transition, and operational support.
- Assess the delivery model and level of IT involvement required for each application initiative.
- Partner with project managers, business leads, application owners, and technical teams to maintain visibility into milestones, risks, dependencies, decisions, issues, and outstanding IT actions without duplicating existing project management responsibilities.
- Dive into application-level details as required to identify gaps, clarify requirements, confirm dependencies, establish ownership, and drive unresolved issues to closure.
- Assess and confirm application readiness throughout the transition lifecycle, including:
- Business and technical requirements
- Solution design and architecture
- Infrastructure readiness
- Security and access requirements
- Interfaces and integrations
- Data requirements and migration
- Testing and validation
- Cutover and deployment planning
- Documentation
- Knowledge transfer
- Operational support and ownership
- Coordinate and drive completion of required IT activities, particularly for business-led initiatives where dedicated IT project management support may not be available.
- Coordinate cross-functional teams across business functions, IT, infrastructure, security, application teams, vendors, service providers, and third-party consultants.
- Support vendor engagement activities as required, including solution evaluations, Statement of Work (SOW) development, estimation, procurement coordination, and delivery tracking.
- Maintain portfolio-level visibility and provide concise executive-level reporting on application status, transition readiness, risks, dependencies, decisions, and areas requiring leadership intervention.
- Proactively identify and escalate applications that lack appropriate ownership, resources, transition plans, decisions, documentation, technical readiness, or delivery accountability.
- Drive issue resolution and accountability across stakeholders to ensure critical transition milestones and business continuity requirements are achieved.
Knowledge Transfer & Data Request Coordination
- Coordinate Knowledge Transfer (KT) activities with business stakeholders, application owners, IT teams, vendors, incumbent service providers, and external parties.
- Ensure KT requests are clearly defined, appropriately documented, submitted through established processes, tracked, and driven through completion.
- Engage with business users, application owners, SMEs, and technology teams to understand existing application knowledge and identify gaps requiring additional documentation, training, or knowledge transfer sessions.
- Facilitate discovery workshops and discussions to understand:
- Application functionality
- Supported business processes
- User groups and stakeholders
- Application ownership
- Interfaces and integrations
- Data flows
- Infrastructure and hosting
- Security requirements
- Upstream and downstream dependencies
- Operational processes
- Support models
- Technical architecture
- Translate identified knowledge gaps into structured, actionable KT requests and coordinate sessions with the appropriate subject matter experts.
- Coordinate Data Requests from business and IT stakeholders by helping define requirements, gather required information, identify data owners, and ensure requests are submitted through established channels and processes.
- Track KT and Data Requests through completion, proactively managing follow-ups, actions, dependencies, approvals, scheduling constraints, and issue resolution.
- Ensure KT outputs, technical documentation, process documentation, architecture information, operational procedures, support information, and other transition artifacts are captured and made available to the appropriate teams.
- Support knowledge retention and operational readiness to ensure receiving teams can effectively support applications following transition or separation.
Project & Portfolio Governance
- Establish and maintain appropriate governance across assigned applications and workstreams.
- Track key milestones, deliverables, risks, issues, assumptions, dependencies, decisions, and actions.
- Maintain RAID logs, readiness trackers, transition plans, status dashboards, and other project governance artifacts as required.
- Facilitate regular project, application, and stakeholder meetings and ensure actions and decisions are documented and followed through.
- Identify cross-application dependencies and risks that may impact broader transition timelines or business operations.
- Provide clear and timely escalation of critical issues to program leadership and senior stakeholders.
- Work collaboratively with program management, PMO, business leadership, and technology teams to ensure alignment with overall transition objectives.
Experience & Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience leading or coordinating complex IT application initiatives, programs, projects, transition programs, or application portfolios.
- Demonstrated success managing work across multiple concurrent applications, stakeholders, vendors, and delivery models.
- 5+ years of strong project and program management discipline, including experience assessing and managing:
- Project plans and milestones
- Risks and issues
- Dependencies
- Governance
- Ownership
- Readiness
- Resource requirements
- Decision-making and escalation
- Ability to operate effectively at both the portfolio/program level and the detailed application level.
- Strong business relationship management, stakeholder management, facilitation, communication, and presentation skills.
- Proven ability to build credibility, influence stakeholders, drive accountability, and navigate challenging cross-functional discussions.
- Working knowledge of enterprise application delivery and transition activities, including infrastructure, security, integrations, testing, deployment, cutover planning, documentation, knowledge transfer, and operational support.
- Experience gathering business and technical requirements and translating them into actionable technology plans, workstreams, decisions, and execution activities.
- Experience facilitating discovery sessions, documenting business processes and application landscapes, identifying knowledge gaps, and coordinating cross-functional information-gathering activities.
- Proven experience managing Knowledge Transfer, documentation, data collection, and transition-readiness activities involving multiple stakeholders.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to identify gaps, dependencies, risks, and ownership issues and drive them to resolution.
- Ability to work effectively in complex, fast-paced transformation environments with multiple parallel initiatives and competing priorities.
Preferred Qualifications
- 5+ years of experience supporting mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, separations, or carve-out programs.
- Experience with enterprise application transitions, migrations, TSA exits, application rationalization, or operational handovers.
- Experience working with geographically distributed teams, global stakeholders, vendors, and third-party service providers.
- Experience supporting application discovery, transition planning, knowledge transfer, data migration, and operational readiness activities.
- Prior experience within Life Sciences, Healthcare, Pharmaceutical, Medical Devices, or other highly regulated industries is desirable.
- PMP, PRINCE2, Agile, Scrum, or equivalent project/program management certification is preferred.
Key Competencies
- IT Project & Program Management
- M&A / Carve-Out Transition Management
- Enterprise Application Transition
- Portfolio Governance
- Knowledge Transfer Management
- Application Discovery & Readiness Assessment
- Risk, Issue & Dependency Management
- Cross-Functional Coordination
- Business & IT Stakeholder Management
- Vendor & Third-Party Management
- Data Request Coordination
- Cutover & Operational Readiness
- Executive Reporting & Escalation
- Strong Communication & Facilitation Skills
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