Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Technical Project Coordinator

🎯 Role Definition

The Technical Project Coordinator acts as the operational backbone for technology and cross-functional projects, coordinating resources, schedules, and communications to ensure timely delivery. This role blends hands-on project administration with technical fluency—managing Jira/Confluence boards, tracking milestones, coordinating QA and release activities, and translating technical status into clear stakeholder updates. Ideal candidates combine a working knowledge of software development lifecycle (SDLC), Agile practices, and vendor/partner coordination with excellent written and verbal communication skills.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Project Coordinator / Project Administrator supporting IT or engineering projects
Junior Technical Analyst or Technical Support Specialist who assisted with releases and documentation
Business Analyst (entry-level) who worked on requirements gathering and stakeholder liaison

Advancement To:

Technical Project Manager or Project Manager (IT/Software)
Program Manager overseeing multiple related projects or product lines
PMO Lead / Delivery Manager responsible for process, governance, and metrics

Lateral Moves:

Product Coordinator / Associate Product Manager
Business Analyst or Systems Analyst supporting technical teams

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Serve as the central project operations coordinator for one or more technical programs, maintaining project plans, live Gantt charts, and milestone trackers to ensure deliverables align with scope, timeline, and budget constraints.
Manage daily project administration tasks—create and maintain backlog items in Jira, prioritize issues in collaboration with product owners and engineering leads, and ensure tickets have acceptance criteria and proper attachments.
Facilitate Agile ceremonies (stand-ups, sprint planning, sprint review, retrospectives) and document outcomes, action items, owners, and due dates to drive sprint accountability and continuous improvement.
Produce concise, stakeholder-friendly status reports and dashboards (weekly and executive-level) that distill technical risk, schedule variance, burn-down metrics, and mitigation plans using tools like Excel, Power BI, or Google Data Studio.
Track and escalate project risks and impediments early; coordinate cross-functional risk remediation with engineering, QA, security, and infrastructure teams to minimize impact on scope and delivery.
Coordinate release management activities across engineering, QA, DevOps, security, and support—prepare release notes, maintain release windows, and manage cutover checklists and rollback plans.
Onboard and coordinate third-party vendors and contractors, maintain SOWs and vendor deliverable trackers, schedule vendor check-ins, and validate vendor progress against contractual milestones.
Maintain and version-control project documentation using Confluence or SharePoint—requirements, design decisions, runbooks, run rates, and postmortem documentation to support traceability and knowledge transfer.
Manage cross-functional dependencies including API integrations, data migrations, and infrastructure changes by creating dependency matrices and tracking completion of prerequisite tasks.
Coordinate user acceptance testing (UAT) activities—prepare test plans, schedule UAT sessions with business stakeholders, collect test evidence, triage defects, and track closure to acceptance criteria.
Facilitate communication between technical teams and non-technical stakeholders by translating engineering status into business impact and prioritization trade-offs.
Maintain project budgets at a task level—track spend against estimates, submit purchase requisitions, and monitor resource allocation and time reporting to prevent overruns.
Ensure compliance with company governance processes—maintain project charters, change control logs, decision logs, and audit artifacts required by PMO or regulatory functions.
Coordinate training and rollout logistics for new releases—prepare training materials, schedule sessions with operations and support teams, and coordinate go-live support rotations.
Assist in scope management by documenting change requests, performing impact assessments with architects and engineers, and updating project plans and stakeholder approvals accordingly.
Collect and maintain metrics for continuous improvement—cycle time, lead time, defect density, and sprint velocity—working with PMO or engineering leads to drive process improvements.
Drive cross-team alignment during integration projects by organizing technical design reviews, interface/contract validation sessions, and ensuring interface owners sign off on integration points.
Maintain and execute action item trackers from cross-functional meetings; proactively push owners for updates, reassign tasks when priorities shift, and keep escalation paths active.
Coordinate incident response communications during production outages—compile post-incident reports, coordinate blameless postmortems, and track corrective actions until verified in production.
Support procurement and vendor invoicing processes by validating deliverables, ensuring milestone acceptance, and coordinating finance approvals to keep supplier services uninterrupted.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis to help product and engineering teams validate assumptions and prioritize features.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap by coordinating data owners, catalog efforts, and data quality initiatives with data engineering teams.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements, ensuring data contracts and SLAs are defined for downstream consumers.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team to help prioritize ingestion, transformation, and pipeline work.
Develop templates, playbooks, and checklists for project initiation, risk assessment, and release readiness to standardize execution across teams.
Help maintain continuous improvement programs by collecting feedback, hosting retrospectives, and implementing high-impact process changes validated via metrics.
Support internal audits by preparing documentation packets and coordinating subject matter experts for walkthroughs with compliance and audit teams.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Project management tools: advanced daily use of Jira/Jira Software, Confluence, Trello, Asana, or Monday.com to manage backlogs, sprints, and cross-team dependencies.
Release and deployment coordination: experience with CI/CD concepts and tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Bamboo) and maintaining release pipelines and cutover checklists.
Agile methodologies: hands-on experience supporting Scrum or Kanban teams, sprint ceremonies, backlog grooming, and story sizing/prioritization.
Documentation & knowledge management: authoring and maintaining technical requirements, runbooks, and operational guides in Confluence or SharePoint.
Reporting and analytics: building project dashboards and KPIs in Excel, Google Sheets, Power BI, or Tableau to provide trend analysis and executive reporting.
Basic technical literacy: familiarity with software development lifecycle (SDLC), APIs, RESTful services, version control (Git), and common data concepts (ETL, schema).
Risk & change management: ability to maintain a change request log, impact analysis, and decision record while coordinating approvals across stakeholders.
Testing coordination: creating UAT plans, coordinating test environments and test data, logging and tracking defects in defect-tracking tools.
Vendor & contractor management: experience tracking statements of work (SOWs), deliverables, SLAs, and coordinating vendor communications and reviews.
Budget & procurement basics: tracking project spend, purchase orders, invoices, and coordinating with finance to ensure timely payments and budget adherence.
Tools integration and automation skills: familiarity with automation of routine tasks using simple scripts, Zapier, or SaaS integrations between tools (Jira <> Slack <> CI).
Compliance & governance: understanding of documentation standards for SOX, ISO, HIPAA, or other industry regulatory requirements when applicable.

Soft Skills

Exceptional written and verbal communication—able to craft executive summaries, technical status updates, and cross-functional emails that clarify decisions and next steps.
Strong stakeholder management—builds trusted relationships with product owners, engineering leads, QA, security, and business stakeholders to align priorities and expectations.
Proactive problem solving—anticipates bottlenecks, proposes mitigation strategies, and drives resolution without waiting for instructions.
Time management and organization—prioritizes work across competing deadlines and maintains focus on critical path activities.
Collaboration and influence—facilitates consensus across cross-functional teams and influences without formal authority.
Attention to detail—accurate tracking of action items, change logs, and compliance documentation to minimize operational risk.
Adaptability and resilience—comfortable working in fast-paced, ambiguous technical environments and pivoting priorities when business needs shift.
Facilitation and meeting management—keeps meetings outcome-oriented, documents action items, and follows up to ensure closure.
Customer-centric mindset—keeps end-user impact front and center when evaluating release readiness and production changes.
Continuous improvement orientation—uses metrics and feedback loops to identify and implement process improvements.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Business Administration, Project Management, or a related technical/business field.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor's degree plus certifications such as CAPM (Certified Associate in Project Management), PMP (Project Management Professional), Scrum Master (CSM/PSM), or relevant technical certifications.
Advanced courses or bootcamps in Agile, product management, or technical project delivery.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science / Software Engineering
Information Systems / Information Technology
Business Administration / Management
Industrial Engineering / Systems Engineering
Project Management / Technical Program Management

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

2–5 years of progressive experience supporting technology, software development, or infrastructure projects in a cross-functional environment.

Preferred:

3+ years coordinating technical projects with demonstrable experience in Agile teams, Jira/Confluence administration, release management, and stakeholder reporting.
Prior experience in SaaS, cloud migrations, integrations, or data/analytics projects is a strong plus.
Experience working within a PMO or in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, or government) is advantageous.