Program Manager

About Nava

Nava is a consultancy and public benefit corporation working to make government services simple and effective. Since 2015, federal, state, and local agencies have trusted Nava to help solve highly scrutinized technology modernization challenges.

As a client services company, we guide agencies constrained by legacy systems to a future with sharp user experiences built on secure, reliable, fault-tolerant cloud infrastructure. We bill for our time, offering our expertise and problem-solving approach to help our government partners enhance their digital products and services. People are at the heart of our work, from members of the public who rely on benefit programs to government agency staff. Through human-centered design and modern engineering best practices, we help our government partners understand user needs and deliver on their missions more effectively. This focus gives everyone at Nava the opportunity to do work that is meaningful, impactful, and deeply connected to public good.

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 Managers 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

Experience with Custom Software or Cloud infrastructure programs/projects

Experience working with or for 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

Desired skills

Program Management experience within a government space

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

Project management in a government context

Track record of introducing and expanding agile transformation and pursuing best practices in project management with clients …