Digital Product & Platform Programme Manager

at  Springer Nature

Date: Mar 11, 2024
Location: London, GB
Company: Springer Nature Group
Macmillan Education provides world class content in the most relevant, engaging and flexible formats to support students, teachers and institutions through a lifetime of learning. Macmillan Education produces content for English Language Teaching (ELT) and for Schools curricula around the world whilst Palgrave Higher Education develops and distributes textbooks, e-books and interactive e-learning resources primarily for University-level students.

SHORT SUMMARY OF THE DIVISION

Working within dynamic and fast paced programmes, the Digital Product & Platform Programme Manager will report to the Director of Digital Product for the delivery of a number of interrelated workstreams across platform roll-outs and legacy platform lifecycle management, new platform feature launches, sales engagement, customer support and launch to market. The Programme Manager will manage the workstream leads to ensure all milestones remain on track and that target dates are achieved for the programmes.
The Digital Product & Platform Programme Manager takes responsibility for the successful delivery of the programme to quality, budget and scope, leading to business critical customer-facing product launches and sales of new products.
The Digital Product & Platform Programme Manager engages and oversees the allocated internal resources and manages any risks and issues related to the Programme deliverables.

EXPERIENCE, SKILLS & QUALIFICATIONS

Experience:

• Seasoned professional with experience of business change, transformation, digital technology programmes or business side scope of product launch.
• Demonstrable experience of successful programme delivery, particularly with Agile/Waterfall hybrid projects
• Experience of working in a fluid environment
• Experience of working as part of a Global, multi-site team
• Experience of working within a structured publishing environment

SKILLS/KNOWLEDGE:

• Understanding and experience of applying project management disciplines and knowledge of the publishing and software development life cycles
• Understanding and experience of comprehensive risk & issue management within complex projects
• Strong leadership skills, with the ability to motivate and steer programme team activity to achieve objectives
• Excellent communication skills and stakeholder management across different organisational levels
• Confident and pro-active approach with the ability to self-manage and take on initiatives to pre-empt and resolve issues
• Flexible approach and the ability to adapt to fast-paced, changing environments
• Team player
• Strong organisational skills with an eye for detail and accuracy
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills

QUALIFICATIONS

• Educated to degree level
• Prince 2 Practitioner and/or Agile qualifications

• Responsible to the Director of Digital Product for the successful delivery of the programme requirements and related business benefits to the agreed time, budget, quality and scope. Blend of working with Agile technical teams and waterfall business workstreams needs to be planned and taken into account.
• Management of the overall workstreams. This would include chairing and driving forward information-sharing and progress at regular Programme Board meetings, tracking progress against plan, writing reports, managing senior stakeholders and keeping the Programme Team and Programme Board updated on progress.
• Responsible for contributing to and overseeing release plans. This would include identifying the milestones, dependencies, resources, risks, issues, mitigations and deliverables. To ensure that the workstream plans are baselined and available to all team members as well as all adjacent service-providing groups. Ensuring that cross workstream communication and working groups are taking place in order to resolve issues.
• To create and communicate regularly to all team members and stakeholders objectives, schedules and deadlines, detailed budgets, and all other Programme parameters and constraints; during life of Programme, troubleshoot and respond quickly to issues to reduce impact on time / cost / quality.
• To apply standard project management practices and methodology as practicable in a way which corresponds but supports the nature of the publishing environment, allowing for agile and waterfall approaches.
• Overall ownership of the Communication Plan including providing regular reporting to team, board level and Operational Dashboard updates. Ensure that updates are aligned and shared with programme teams and Sponsors. Also includes planning of company-wide comms to ensure that other indirect stakeholders are informed.
• To think creatively and to be adaptive in finding solutions whilst proactively engaging with stakeholders, Programme team and suppliers to ensure any miscommunications, risks and issues are addressed and mitigated against as early as possible.
• To coordinate closely with all areas and departments involved as appropriate, to ensure a coordinated approach and ongoing communication lines, particularly around matrix management and availability of programme resources.
• To support the Publishing community to identify potential future publishing using the new platform, and onboarding them to the Programme in a structured way based on Lessons learned from previous title publishing.