Project Manager Roles

Role Description

Our team includes project managers who oversee execution of strategic and technical consulting work, covering a variety of project types with the marketing, communications, fundraising and IT departments of our clients. Our work spans the planning, configuration, and implementation of MarTech platforms and their integrations, including: websites, email platforms, data and analytics tools, CRMs, digital asset management tools, and more.

Do you have a knack for getting to the root of problems? Do you enjoy learning to use new systems and tools? Do your organization skills and attention to detail earn you praise from colleagues? Are you great at building consensus among team members and stakeholders with varying skill sets and levels of technical expertise? Do you like working with mission-driven organizations to increase their impact?

If that sounds like you, please read on!

Project Manager Career Levels

We hire Project Managers at three different career levels. While the core job functions are similar, as outlined in the job description below, we recognize that no one candidate will bring every piece of the described skills and experience. The three career levels, outlined below, reflect the varied level of expertise you might bring on day one, the level of responsibility expected, and the opportunities for advancement.

Job Responsibilities

Project Team & Client Coordination 

• Manage project logistics, including scheduling, meeting preparation and facilitation, capturing minutes, and managing follow ups/actions
• Build relationships with clients, freelancers, partners and teammates through empathetic communications and relationship building
• Facilitate and monitor team tasking, allocating tasks and time according to project budget
• Maintain up-to-date documentation, including contracts, invoicing, and scope/tasking, for accurate views of project status
• Facilitate issue resolution among clients and team members to when questions or concerns arise
• Coordinate with other project managers to prioritize team time and tasks across projects
• Effectively work with a distributed, remote team (we were remote pre-COVID, and will continue to be!)

Schedule, Budget and Scope Management

• Operate with an ownership mentality, partnering with the Project Lead to ensure execution of the contracted budget, schedule and scope
• Demonstrate understanding of and put into practice common project management methodologies, including those for managing technical work (e.g. agile, wagile, kanban)
• Interpret and translate contract scope into project budget, schedule, activities and milestones
• Manage schedule, budget, and scope of projects, proactively escalating and reporting on status, through written and presented status reports
• Facilitate completion of all project work, ensuring it is managed to completion within scope and budget, even if you aren’t executing yourself
• Be accountable for all project milestones and ensure they are met by the project implementation team
• Proactively anticipate risks, and develop appropriate mitigation strategies
• Configure and manage project spaces in our client portal (Teamwork), tasking systems (Teamwork, GitHub, ClickUp, etc), knowledge management systems (Confluence, Google Drive), and project/time tracking systems (Resource Management/SmartSheets)
• Manage partner and vendor contracts, ensuring their work is completed and payments are issued according to contract terms

Project Oversight & Contributions

• Know and anticipate the common phases, tasks, risks and dependencies for both strategic and technical projects (website builds, platform migrations, and other technical/configuration work for MarTech tools and systems)
• Coordinate with vendor and contractor teams, liaising with partner company project managers to ensure top level requirements are met by downstream tasking, and ensuring success criteria and definitions of “done” are captured at an appropriate level of detail
• Triage requests from clients, answering them when you’re able, passing on to the appropriate team member, and for technical work, differentiating between editorial questions, issues/bug fixes, and new feature enhancements
• Facilitate team meetings to highlight upcoming milestones, review tasks, discuss and document unclear technical specifications, and troubleshoot issues
• Create and present client-ready status reports, synthesizing inputs from team and contractors
• Support deliverable creation, including creating templates or outlines, synthesizing notes, formatting work into client-ready documents, and providing copy editing support for grammar and clarity
• Perform testing and quality assurance of technical work by navigating systems (CMS, Email platforms, etc) as an editor or admin to testing new features, review templates, or identify bug fixes
• Demonstrate familiarity with technical concepts such as APIs, DNS & IP addresses, caching, front end/back end development, manual quality assurance, automated testing, and load testing. Have a passable understanding of CSS and HTML, including exploratory editing via browser developer tools.

Departmental Process Improvements 

• Recommend customized project management approaches that reflect our different types of work, and meet the needs of various clients
• Identify and raise opportunities for improvement in our processes
• Independently learn, test, and refine new tools or processes to improve project efficiency, consistency, and profitability
• Create or refine documentation of standard PTKO processes
• Conduct retroactive reviews of all projects to identify opportunities for improvements in estimating of work and/or project delivery
• Keep up with best practices in project management, and communicate these to your peers, especially as they relate to nonprofit and digital communications industries
• Train other project managers on project management approaches
• Mentor and support teammates, including providing direct coaching for junior project managers

Experience We’re Seeking

Requirements

• For more senior roles, experience working as a project manager, preferably in a consulting or client services environment
• Education and/or experience relevant to the role and responsibilities
• Fluent in English
• Legal to work in the USA (Sorry no visa sponsorships)

Extra Credit

Experiences like these will add additional weight to your application:

• Training, certifications, or a degree in project management
• Previous digital agency, marketing firm, or consulting experience, especially work on digital marketing projects
• Demonstrated experience or interest in the nonprofit or social sector
• Proficiency in Spanish

All that said – if your experience looks a little different from what we’ve identified and you think you can rock the role, we’d love to learn more about you!

Locations

Our team operates remotely, but is primarily based around a few hubs to facilitate occasional in-person team and client interactions (when safely possible!). We will consider candidates anywhere in the continental US, but have a preference for people within driving distance of our hubs, including:

• Washington, DC/Northern Virginia
• San Francisco Bay Area, CA
• Texas (Austin and Dallas/Fort Worth)
• North Carolina (Raleigh/Durham, Greensboro/Winston-Salem)

During COVID, we continue to operate fully remote, and encourage our teams to travel or move around if you would like. You can be in any time zone but must work continental US business hours. Staff must also have a US-based home address.

Salary & Benefits

The salary range for these positions is $50,000 – 80,000, and varies based on which role we think you best fit based on your experience, how quickly we believe you’ll deliver value, and how much training and onboarding we’ll need to provide. We benchmark salaries using nationwide averages, and stick closely to our benchmarks to ensure equity for our team.

Our goal is to provide benefits that support our employees and their families in work and life. We’re constantly evaluating and adding to our benefits to make them more inclusive, equitable, and aligned to what our employees really want. A summary of benefits available to full-time PTKO staff can be found on our website. You can also read more about our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion at PTKO.

Who We Are

At ParsonsTKO (PTKO), we work with mission-driven organizations to help them drive better engagement with audiences – their donors, members, supporters, grantees, employees, or anyone they communicate with regularly. We like to think our approach is a little different, blending the best of consulting firms and digital agencies. We call what we do Engagement Architecture, combining strategy to organize outreach and messaging, the technology deployed to deliver them, and the tactics used to integrate audience touch points and interactions. We help our clients organize and manage not just their website and other communications software, but also the related marketing and outreach strategies that connect people to their mission. You can view a sampling of our clients and case studies of our work on our website.