Sr Technical Project Manager

Experience with any property management system is a must, Opera is preferred. At a minimum, this individual must understand the hotel business and what property management systems do. Must have experience PowerPoint, SharePoint, Service now, the typical tools Hyatt uses. Bilingual is a plus. The manager will begin to review resumes on Fridays to schedule interviews the following week.

PURPOSE:
We are looking for a Senior Technical Project Manager to shape and manage various projects in the Hyatt’s PMS Technical team. You will be responsible for intake and delivery of projects that involve Opera PMS hosting or its related interfaces. The Senior Technical Project Manager will also be responsible for communicating with all stakeholders to assure successful project delivery.
Team Structure
- Reports to Sr. Manager of Property Systems. (This is the team responsible for hosting Opera in Hyatt’s datacenter.)
- Coordinates resources, establishes deadlines, and assigns responsibilities
- Initially, resources do not report directly to this position. They are assigned to projects managed by this position. The candidate directs resources as part of delivering the project.
- Resources are sourced from a matrix organization consisting of 4 engineers, 2 other PM’s, and 6 tech support staff
- In time, this position may grow into one that manages others full time
Office
- Candidate must work the majority of their time from Hyatt’s Chicago corporate office
- Candidate is expected to put in approximately 40 hours per week. Daily start times are flexible.
- Occasional overtime is expected if project “crunch time” requires it
- Occasional late night hours may be required when supervising off-hours cutovers

POSITION RESPONSIBILITIES:
Deliverables
- Plan, coordinate, supervise, and communicate activities related to the design, development, testing, and deployment of changes to the Opera system hosted in Hyatt’s datacenter

What is the Opera System?
- Hotel property management system
- Developed by Oracle and hosted in Hyatt’s datacenter
- Core to daily hotel operations. (Front desk check-in, back-office accounting, interfaces to 200 other systems like door locks, TV’s, and garages.)

Samples Projects
- Implementing new application versions received from the vendor
- Standing up a new datacenter in another region
- Monthly patching of windows application servers
- Testing disaster recover readiness
- Implementing interfaces/services of additional vendors to/from Opera
- Building additional non-prod environments to give internal testers more varied test configurations

EXPERIENCE AND QUALIFICATIONS:
Must Have Strong Written and Verbal Communication Skills
- Written status reports and PPT’s
- Exec steering committee presentations. Must be able to read the room to understand appropriate level of detail.
- Liaise with technical and non-technical people at the hotels
- Tracking with vendors regarding scope, dates, and issues
- Editing documentation written by engineers so that it is easily understood by non-technical hotel staff

Collaboration
- Discuss business requirements with Business partners
- Discuss technical requirements, issues, and estimates with engineers
- Should have experience with the typical resistance or inability of engineers to provide detailed estimates
- Work with multiple technical and non-technical teams
- Work with multiple teams that test their application integrations with Opera

Project Intake
- Review scope and other intake documents provided by our business partners and work with those business partners to develop the missing pieces before proceeding with Engineering teams
- Work with engineers to determine high-level estimates
- Work with managers to determine where projects fall in the priority list
- Communicate projected start dates and durations to requestors

Project Management
- Acumen to know when artifacts in project methodology are necessary and when they can be skipped
- Track detailed status, issues, deliverables, and next steps
- Structured methodology for managing all the details for multiple projects simultaneously
- 5+ years running projects of different sizes
- Must have participated in (not necessarily owned) at least one 8-12 month (or longer) 10+ person-year project
- Must have owned at least one 6+ month project
- Creates, manages and executes project plans
- Critical path management: understand how constraints affect estimates
- Experience estimating and managing project budgets is a big plus

Meetings
- Expected to schedule and run meetings with project team members
- Must be able to run efficient meetings. (Publish agendas. Come prepared. Keep people on task. End early when possible. Cancel standing meetings when not necessary. Publish minutes – including follow up tasks.)
- Must be an active listener, not just taking notes of others’ conversations. Look for holes in others’ plans and brainstorm with them to find solutions.
- Facilitate brainstorming and problem solving of issues

Testing
- Understand different classes of testing (unit, integration, functional, performance, smoke)

Primary Tech Knowledge and Experience
- Worked on tech projects for 10+ years
- Background as an individual contributor in some technology discipline strongly preferred. (e.g., developer, engineer, etc)
- Have a working knowledge of technical components in a datacenter. (E.g., Virtual machines, networking, etc.) Not expected to be an expert in any of these technologies, but basic knowledge is necessary to understand the context of details provided by engineers.

PREFERRED SKILLS:
Secondary Technology Knowledge and Experience
- Experience with any of the following technologies is a plus. None are required.
- Oracle DB, Virtual machines (Vsphere), F5 network gear, infoblox DNS, active directory, distributed file servers, PURE storage
- Java & Oracle Forms client, served up by weblogic
- Automation: PowerShell, Ansible, Rundeck

Business Knowledge
- Hospitality experience a strong plus (but not required)
- Must be a subject matter expert in some discipline from previous work experience. (Not interested in project coordinators that do not absorb any details in their environment.)
- Must be interested in acquiring business expertise of Hyatt’s systems and growing into a subject matter expert over time