Senior Project Planner

GEICO is seeking a highly motivated Senior Project Planner to join our team. The successful candidate will be responsible for planning and coordinating large-scale projects across the enterprise. You must be comfortable working with vendor management, project management, budget tracking, and other duties as assigned.

• Proactively partner with and communicate to project stakeholders to ensure that all solutions are effectively delivered to meet the needs of GEICO's IT, HR, Payroll, Financials, and Talent organizations.
• Deliver communications, reports and presentations to stakeholders that is timely, accurate, and provides for effective follow up resolution for the program's related projects, ensuring sponsor(s) and stakeholders have visibility and the correct information to make required decisions.
• Effectively manage and communicate the intent of all projects for the stakeholders and assist in the motivation of those working on the project to achieve the expectations of the project.
• Able to understand the whole picture (see the forest and not just the trees) to be able to clearly articulate the requirements of Stakeholder's objectives so that each project can be implemented on time, as expected, and on budget.

• Leverage current Project Management methodologies (SDLC, Agile, Scrum) and tools (MS Project, Jira, Kanban Boards, Excel, etc.) to effectively plot out and manage the progression of the project as well as provide effective tracking of the prioritization and resolution of all project related issues, risks, decisions required.
• Establishes milestones, anticipates issues, and monitors adherence to program scope, requirements, design documents, and schedules.
• Proactively compiles and manages all project plans for the program as well as manage external vendor project plans into the overall plan for the program. Ensure that all associated activities' due dates remain on track and initiate solutions to bring issues causing delays to resolution.
• Identifies and coordinates risk planning and mitigation for all ongoing and new projects across multiple organizations.
• Provide timely documentation related to external vendors (such as Workday, etc.), consisting of SOC I and II reporting, Bridge Letters, etc., to the stakeholders ensuring that the corporation meets all objectives for the Internal Audit department, Deloitte, and Johnson and Lambert audits.
• Assist the organizational project sponsor(s) to determine project cost and benefits.
• Proactively manage all project expenses to provide a monthly update on run rates, annual and year to date spend, and projected project budget available. Initiates requirements for additional budget, when necessary.
• Handles all processing of invoices for external resources.
• Interfaces with user groups and departments on development projects as well as on problem diagnosis and resolution.
• Facilitates agreement among all technical teams regarding infrastructure architecture.
• Assures all architectural or system design issues are identified, tracked and resolved on a timely basis.
• Performs ad hoc research and analysis for small and large scale projects to ensure infrastructure requirements are identified, tracked and met.
• Lead regular client and vendor meetings to achieve objective of the meeting and document the outcome of the meeting.
• Build trust with stakeholders, team members and vendors alike, exercising empathy, communication and negotiation skills.

• Performs process engineering through the review, refinement and improvement of existing processes and manages the improvements to completion without jeopardizing tactical delivery.
• Assist stakeholders across multiple organizations (HR, IT, Financials, Payroll and Talent) by serving as the Process Owner for the Workday Change Control process, thereby providing process leadership/direction for all related Workday Changes post project implementation.
• As Process Owner, ensure all processes are followed by the organization to meet the objectives of the Internal Audit, Deloitte, and Johnson and Lambert audit processes.
• Collaborate with Stakeholders to identify and document operational business processes for the all programs.
• Leverage process definition methods and tools to deliver operations business process improvements for all programs.
• Monitor engagement team performance and provide feedback where necessary.

• Leverage all available tools (such as Share Point, Box, MS Project, Confluence, JIRA, Kanban Boards, and Change Controls by developing and maintain artifacts/tools that are used on projects across all stages.
• Provide high attention to detail as it relates to building and managing the artifacts and tools utilized to manage projects.

• Assist in the planning, development and delivery of training associated with project solutions for the stakeholders and teams.
• Plan, develop, and deliver stakeholder communication as it relates to the implementation of projects.
• Assist in the assessment of organizational readiness for change and development of targeted action plans to motivate positive change behaviors.

• Leads and participates in Contractual Reviews, SOW/RFI/RFP initiation, construction and management for external vendor selection and processing.
• Work with all external vendors to ensure the completion of Statements of Works, Contracts Signatures, and Purchase Orders on a timely basis to allow for project consultants to begin working on the projects on time.
• Coordinates and manages external vendors working on large scale projects that span multiple organizations.
• Performs internal escalation management as it relates to non-performing vendors.
• Provide consultant data for those assigned to projects to the internal teams to ensure that they have the immediate and appropriate access to the project tool areas (such as Development and Implementation environments, Share Point, Box, requests for VPN and VDI, Workday Change Control.)
• Manage and provide external consultant information for entry into the corporate office.