Tech Lead / Portfolio Manager 
Location: Remote
Duration: Long Term Contract
Pay: $80+/hr

JOB DESCRIPTION  
Pushing the bounds of the retail world, this company is highly successful and accumulates over fifty billion dollars in annual revenue. Diversity of thought, community, and even location is paramount to this company, which is why this company has expanded their communal reach to over two thousand different storefronts. With a mind for diversity, this company understands the worth of their employees and they strive to create a practical work life balance for their employees. This practical and diverse mentality is extended to the ample opportunities that they offer to their employees, including overtime for contractors, as well as other monetary and title-based incentives. Longevity of employment is pivotal to this company, and they actively search and create long term employment options even for contractors. Between the diversity that this company offers and the job security that this company offers, even to contactors, this company proves that it has an unequivocal entrepreneurial spirit and is insurmountably invested in their employees.

This Candidate will be expected to direct lifecycle activities including selection, implementation, and upgrade of a collection of solutions in an assigned portfolio, oversee the effectiveness of the assigned portfolio against the business strategy and roadmap, and provide technical leadership in the planning, development, implementation and operational support processes of new business solutions and enhancements of existing application software/infrastructure in the assigned portfolio.             
RESPONSIBILITIES 

• Manages the investment portfolio and ensure that all planned investments are aligned with the business and IT stakeholders and have executive stakeholder commitment.
• Continuously evaluate, prioritize, and optimize IT investment portfolio based on strategic value, business needs, cost/benefits, and critical risk across all regions. The portfolio manager ensures that Investment evaluation process meets the company's investment standards and criteria and has the proper authorization level.
• Continuously review the project investment portfolio to identify and exploit synergies, eliminate duplication across all regions and between individuals’ programs.
• Reviews and assess strategic project initiation deliverables such business cases on strategic justification and risk.
• Manages resources to support demand.  
• Ensure that the "solution teams" efforts are properly scheduled and staffed, that all staff are properly allocated to ensure that commitments are met as scheduled and within budget.
• Organize and direct the "solution team" and third-party providers in the planning, development, implementation and operations support of systems to support the assigned portfolio in alignment with the IM strategic roadmap.
• Scheduling of projects based on financial and strategic justifications in close cooperation with business and IT stakeholders.
• Identification of direct and indirect dependencies.
• Updates and maintain the integrated portfolio roadmap based on latest changes on project and program level.
• Facilitates integrated planning sessions across domains.
• Communication of a multi-layered portfolio plan.
• Coordinates with Leadership, Project Managers, vendors, and Business Consultants to allocate resources to areas within the portfolio in need of most improvement.
• Balance the resources across projects and operating units to optimize benefits delivery to the business.
• Responsible for cost consequence within portfolio. Study, analyze, and define the impact of business needs on the system components and its interfaces to provide maximum benefits from each system and drive Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).
• Continuously monitor and track the full company IT project portfolio, its progress and performance and the successful development of the required business and IT capabilities.
• Tracking, mitigation of critical and portfolio-wide risks and issues and escalation to the appropriate IT leadership meetings. Monitor overall risk profile of project portfolio.
• Co-ordination of critical project interdependencies to safeguard the coherent and integrated definition, planning and delivery of the portfolio.
• Provides senior IT and business leadership with accurate view of the project/investment portfolio based on appropriate performance targets allowing them to make rapid and effective decisions.
• Ensures life cycle assessment for selected portfolio components occurs, determining remaining useful life of hardware/software components based on business functionality, technical architecture, vendor strategies, competitor activities, and package alternatives.
• Identify projects that require independent quality assurance (e.g. high risk, high value projects)
• Facilitates stage-gates for strategic high-risk projects in the portfolio.
• Develop portfolio quality assurance framework, standards, and tooling.
• Support the delivery of project quality assurance (e.g. peer reviews)
• Benefits tracking: initiate the process to monitor actual benefit realization in the business after project implementation.
• Evaluates if business benefits significantly deviate from expected benefits, escalate issues to the appropriate party and implement lessons learned in the portfolio prioritization process.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Fluent English (word and writing)
• Analytical skills
• Strong facilitator skills in improvement processes; Strong in strategic topics, adding value to vision and strategy.
• Relevant Bachelor/master’s degree (e.g. Business Administration, IT Management)
• 8-10 years progressively responsible technical leadership experience in IT
• This role must have knowledge of retail grocery and the technology that supports that environment including topics in Security, Network, Technical Design, and Quality Assurance.
• They should have demonstrated knowledge of current and emerging technology and trends.
• Proficiency in using structured systems development methods and techniques.  Process knowledge/ thinking (General Architect).
• Experience with Windows server based applications, SQL Databases, some .Net experience is a plus.

Category Code: JN008