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We are seeking an experienced person to work within the Project Management Centre of Excellence in the Audit Practice to provide Project Management support to audit and assurance engagements that support the delivery of effective and high quality work.

The Project Manager role is to provide high quality project management services to improve the day-to-day running of engagements being delivered by KPMG. It will be your job to establish, run and evolve the engagement teams’ core capabilities that focus around excellence in project delivery and assurance.

From a delivery excellence perspective the Project Manager, working with a PMO will be responsible for providing the tools and capabilities to support the delivery of the engagement, as well as providing project support and analysing data to support management decision making and communication.

The PM role will also provide ad-hoc quality assurance and health-checks to ensure work is being carried out in accordance with agreed objectives, and undertake various levels of reporting to ensure the various workstreams demonstrate achievement of the stated objectives.

Additionally, the Project Manager will have line management responsibility for any assigned administrative staff. This will include imparting knowledge, skills and experience to support career development/coaching of team members and support provision of best practice. In undertaking these duties, the Project Manager will support change and adoption of new ways of working.

Role and Responsibilities

The role needs to be able to respond to changing priorities and be able to respond to changes in business needs in a dynamic environment.

Key Responsibilities include:

• Developing strong, trusting and credible working relationships with senior staff on engagements, and other key business stakeholders where applicable
• Overseeing resourcing requirements and on-boarding staff for engagements
• Working with Engagement Leaders and Audit Managers, co-ordinate activities on the planning of audits to ensure KPMG planning requirements and deadlines are achieved
• Setting project timelines and tracking the team’s progress against those goals
• Working with Audit Managers, optimise the use of resources including KGS offshore and improve efficiency in audit delivery
• Hold Audit Managers/Senior Managers to account for the delivery of their audits
• Ensuring effective audit governance through the regular reporting of audit progress, achievement of milestones, changes to agreed delivery plan and delivery risks/issues
• Ensuring KPMG’s commercial processes are being effectively managed (WIP, Lock-up, and Additional Scope)
• Providing Project Management coaching support within the team, to build capability
• Identification and tracking of interdependencies between key pieces of work being delivered on the engagement.
• Development and delivery of required executive reporting at various levels.
• Implementation of relevant systems and tools to support the delivery of work for the engagement.
• Providing and organising quality assurance reviews and health checks to ensure work is being undertaken to a sufficiently high standard.
• Working with Finance to oversee management of fees and billing.
• Supporting tools used by the engagement team to manage client data and data requests.
• Line management responsibilities for administrative staff within the team including: objective setting, performance management, guidance and support, specific coaching.
• Organising initiatives to keep team engagement high throughout the project.

Essential requirements:

• Ability to work positively with the wide range of individuals and stakeholders involved in audit planning and delivery.
• Capable of developing and maintaining effective working relationships with members of Transformation and Managed Services team, Senior Managers, Directors, Partners, project teams and 3rd party service providers.
• Demonstrates strong leadership and management skills to be capable of managing the PMO.
• Demonstrates credibility within the programme and project delivery environment and ability to influence others.
• Clear knowledge of techniques for planning, monitoring, data analysis, reporting etc., including risk management.
• Good knowledge and demonstrable use of project and programme management methodology and techniques
• Good understanding of the audit quality objectives
• Good understanding of risk based resource allocation
• Proven coaching skills
• Able to create effective business plans and business cases.
• Experience of budgeting and resource allocation procedures.
• A self-starter, with high initiative, driven and enthusiastic with a ‘can-do’ attitude and a strong sense of ownership to get the job done in a practical and pragmatic fashion without upsetting others.
• Fluent written and oral English communications skills and strong interpersonal skills that can be executed credibly to inspire confidence in you and the delivery of the project.
• Capable and innovative problem solver with a pragmatic and tenacious attitude to seek out resolutions.
• Experience of working in a Professional Services environment would be advantageous.
• Experience of having line managed a number of project professionals would be an advantage.
• Demonstrable PMO expertise with experience of having set-up and evolved PMO capabilities are desirable as well as the ability to maintain a high quality BAU service.
• Degree level in a business related subject or equivalent

Desirable

• Experience of various project and programme management approaches
• Recognised professional accreditation in Project Management
• Experience in using Microsoft Project