Senior Program Manager

About NavaNava is a consultancy and public benefit corporation working to make government services simple, effective, and accessible to all. Since 2013, federal, state, and local government agencies have trusted Nava to build transformative digital services to help people access public benefits. Meeting our mission is an opportunity to restore trust between people and public institutions. We focus on populations that are the least protected because the stakes are higher.

As a client services company, we work with government agencies to improve how people apply for benefits, navigate their health care, and more. We bill for our time, selling our expertise and problem-solving methodology to government clients. Our clients hire us to help improve their products and services so that their users and beneficiaries have a better customer experience.

These end-users—the humans who benefit from our work—are at the core of everything we do. We research beneficiaries’ needs to help our government clients better deliver on their missions, providing everyone at Nava opportunities to do meaningful, impactful work.

Position summary Nava is at the forefront of reimagining how our government serves its people, and we’re looking for a Program Manager to lead the delivery and client engagement efforts on a group of strategic contracts.At Nava, members of the Program leadership team are responsible for client trust and relationships, team clarity and health, staffing, contract management / profit & loss, and organic growth. Details are in the What You'll Do section below.

Nava's Program Manager’s have 5+ years of experience overseeing delivery outcomes and client relationships for a set of small- to medium-sized projects to create positive delivery environments.

What You’ll Do

• Exceed the expectations of our government partners by cultivating strong, trusting relationships and maintaining high situational awareness at the agency level
• Proactively detect risks and work collaboratively with the delivery team and program stakeholders to effectively resolve them (issues can span delivery, process, culture, expectation setting, staffing, contract milestones, finances)
• Engage our clients on a continuing basis to ensure their needs are met or exceeded, understand their vision, collaboratively solve issues, and communicate our progress transparently
• Maintain awareness of the broader project landscape and potential for new opportunities and risks and grow your portfolio accordingly with surge contract line item numbers (CLINs), option years, and negotiations with prime contractors.
• Collaborate across projects and across the organization to proactively anticipate and solve problems across delivery
• Support the creation of delivery environments built on mutual trust between government partners and our team
• Scale efforts through a team of project managers and other functional delivery leads
• Manage all the contracts and finances on within your portfolio in coordination with the finance team and coordinate necessary contract modifications
• Set and uphold standards for delivery excellence and client service
• Apply Nava's policies and guidance at the program level (E.g. utilization guidance)
• Participate in developing on and delivering company objectives and key results

Required skills

• Must have experience with Custom Software or Cloud infrastructure programs/projects
• Previous experience in managing Paid Family Leave Benefits Programs
• Experience working with or for state government agencies
• Experience with growing agile development teams and the challenges of managing a project at scale
• Ability to demonstrate experience leading projects with significant complexity, including managing milestones, dependencies, and integrations with significant risk, uncertainty or scale
• Experience using agile frameworks like scrum, kanban, or SAFe and familiarity with agile development practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery
• You are an empathetic communicator and relationship builder – you take a service-oriented approach to supporting the program team and our clients
• Adaptable problem solving and ability to deal with multi-dimensional challenges involving many organizations, processes, cultures, and technologies
• You are highly organized and care deeply about building and growing a sustainable, culture-conscious business
• A strategic approach to delivery planning and contract management over the medium-term and long-term
• An iterative approach to execution that emphasizes rapid team progress
• Ability to maintain broader situational awareness beyond the immediate team
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Occasional travel
• Must be able to work in East Coast time zone

Desired skills

• Experience launching new production systems with high public visibility
• Experience with long term, complex, and ambiguous IT modernization efforts
• Experience with using common project management tools like Jira and Confluence
• Track record of introducing and expanding agile transformation and pursuing best practices in project management with clients and stakeholders
• Experience managing projects that provide production operations and support alongside ongoing product/feature development