Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT Program Manager

🎯 Role Definition

The IT Program Manager leads complex, cross-functional technology programs from strategy through delivery, ensuring scope, schedule, budget and business outcomes are achieved. This role partners with engineering, product, security, infrastructure, vendors and senior stakeholders to drive enterprise transformations (cloud migrations, ERP rollouts, data platform builds, security & compliance initiatives), implement program governance, and deliver measurable benefits. The ideal candidate combines deep program management expertise (Agile and Waterfall), strong stakeholder and vendor management, technical fluency (cloud, integrations, DevOps), and proven experience delivering large-scale IT initiatives on time and within budget.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Senior Project Manager managing multiple concurrent IT projects
Technical Program Manager focused on cross-team engineering initiatives
IT Delivery Manager or PMO Lead with enterprise program exposure

Advancement To:

Director of IT Programs / Program Management Office (PMO)
Senior Program Director / Head of Technology Programs
Vice President of IT Delivery or VP of Technology Operations

Lateral Moves:

Product Manager for platform or infrastructure products
Portfolio Manager / Business Transformation Manager

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead end-to-end delivery of large, multi-year IT programs (cloud migrations, ERP/CRM implementations, data platform modernization efforts), translating strategic objectives into prioritized roadmaps, release plans, and measurable milestones.
Define program governance, decision-making frameworks, escalation paths and RACI models that ensure clear accountability, timely decisions, and consistent status reporting across multiple workstreams and delivery teams.
Own program financials: build and maintain program budgets, forecasts, capital and operating cost tracking, variance analysis, and formal business case management to ensure programs deliver expected ROI and benefits realization.
Manage cross-functional stakeholder relationships at the executive level, including regular steering committee updates, risk reviews, prioritization workshops and alignment of business and technology objectives.
Develop and maintain comprehensive program plans and integrated master schedules using Agile and Waterfall practices as appropriate; coordinate sprint cadences, release trains (SAFe), milestone-based deliverables and external vendor timelines.
Drive vendor and contract management activities: select and onboard strategic vendors, negotiate SOWs and SLAs, manage vendor performance and commercial outcomes, and resolve contractual disputes to protect program timelines and budgets.
Implement robust risk, issues and change management processes: identify, track and remediate program-level risks and impediments, maintain mitigation plans, and ensure rapid resolution of cross-team dependencies.
Align program architecture and solution design with enterprise architecture, security, compliance and data governance standards to minimize technical debt and meet regulatory requirements (SOX, GDPR, HIPAA where applicable).
Coordinate large-scale integrations and cutovers between legacy systems and new platforms, including detailed cutover planning, rollback strategies, data migration validation, and post-implementation support.
Lead release and deployment planning with DevOps and engineering teams to ensure repeatable CI/CD pipelines, automated testing coverage, release approvals, and rollback procedures are in place for production deployments.
Establish and track program KPIs and success metrics (on-time delivery, budget variance, defect rates, adoption, business benefits), produce executive dashboards, and drive continuous improvement based on performance data.
Direct resource planning and capacity management across internal teams and contractors, ensuring the right skills are available when needed and that resource constraints are proactively resolved.
Orchestrate enterprise change management and adoption activities: develop training plans, communication strategies, stakeholder adoption metrics, and business readiness checklists to maximize adoption and minimize business disruption.
Lead cross-team collaboration across engineering, product, security, QA, network, infrastructure, and business stakeholders to resolve blocking issues and maintain program momentum.
Oversee program-level quality assurance: define test strategies, coordinate integration and performance testing, ensure test coverage and acceptance criteria are met prior to release.
Manage program-related procurement and purchasing processes, prepare budget requests, and coordinate approvals with finance and procurement teams to accelerate vendor onboarding and contract execution.
Own incident and outage coordination for program-related systems, leading post-incident reviews, root-cause analysis, and corrective action plans to prevent recurrence.
Drive compliance and audit readiness for program deliverables including documentation, evidence trails, configuration baselines, and control implementations required by internal and external auditors.
Mentor and develop program managers, project leads and other delivery staff; build high-performing teams, encourage career development and enforce consistent program management best practices across the organization.
Champion security and privacy best practices across the program, working closely with security architects and compliance teams to integrate threat modeling, secure coding and data protection into delivery lifecycles.
Lead cross-functional workshops to de-risk complex technical decisions, prioritize feature backlogs, and ensure alignment between business value and technical effort.
Manage vendor transitions and third-party integrations, including API strategy, connectivity, SLA monitoring and remediation escalations to ensure smooth operations and contractual compliance.
Coordinate with finance and business stakeholders to realize program benefits, capture business value, and produce post-implementation reviews that quantify savings, productivity gains or revenue impact.
Drive cost optimization and cloud cost governance for cloud-native programs (AWS, Azure, GCP), including rightsizing, reserved instance strategy, tagging, and showback/chargeback mechanisms.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Maintain comprehensive program documentation, lessons learned, and post-mortem reports to inform continuous improvement and future program planning.
Assist PMO with process standardization, templates, program intake prioritization and maturity assessments.
Support procurement, SOW creation, and vendor onboarding tasks for program suppliers and contractors.
Coordinate training schedules and change adoption campaigns with HR and business units to maximize user readiness.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Program & Project Management (PMP, PgMP, or equivalent experience in running multi-workstream, enterprise IT programs).
Agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe) and hybrid delivery models combining Agile and Waterfall.
Portfolio and roadmap planning with tools like JIRA, Confluence, MS Project or Planview.
Cloud platform experience (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform) and cloud migration planning.
Enterprise architecture alignment and integration patterns (APIs, ESB, microservices).
Vendor & contract management including SOW negotiation, SLA management and vendor performance metrics.
Budgeting, forecasting and financial management for IT programs, including CAPEX/OPEX tracking and variance analysis.
Risk, issue and change management frameworks and tooling for cross-functional escalation and mitigation.
DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines, including familiarity with Jenkins/GitHub Actions/GitLab and automated testing strategies.
Security and compliance knowledge (common standards such as ISO 27001, SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA, or SOX controls).
Data migration and data governance fundamentals (ETL strategies, data validation, master data management).
ITSM and operational readiness (ITIL practices, incident & problem management, runbooks).
Testing and QA strategies for integration, performance and user acceptance testing.
Analytical skills and experience producing executive dashboards and program KPIs using Power BI, Tableau or similar.
Familiarity with ERP systems (SAP, Oracle) and large application transformation lifecycles.

Soft Skills

Executive stakeholder management and strong executive presence for effective steering committee engagements.
Exceptional communication skills — able to translate technical trade-offs into business impacts for diverse audiences.
Strong leadership and people management — coaching, motivating and developing cross-functional teams.
Strategic thinking with ability to translate corporate strategy into actionable program roadmaps.
Conflict resolution and negotiation skills to manage competing priorities among stakeholders and vendors.
Decision-making under uncertainty with pragmatic risk tolerance and prioritization discipline.
Change management and organizational influence to drive adoption and behavioral change.
High emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills for cross-cultural, distributed team collaboration.
Strong problem-solving mindset with attention to detail and bias toward implementation and outcomes.
Time management and multitasking ability to steward multiple streams and shifting priorities.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Business Administration or related field.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree (MS, MBA) or equivalent advanced degree; relevant program management certifications (PMP, PgMP, SAFe Program Consultant) are highly desirable.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science / Software Engineering
Information Systems / IT Management
Business Administration / Project Management
Data Science or Information Security (for specialized programs)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

7–15+ years of progressive experience in IT program or project management, with at least 3–5 years leading large, cross-functional enterprise programs.

Preferred:

Proven track record delivering multi-million dollar programs (including cloud, ERP, security or data platform migrations), experience managing distributed engineering teams, vendor ecosystems and executive stakeholders; demonstrated ability to deliver measurable business outcomes and benefits realization.