Salesforce Project Manager

Salesforce Project Manager1 🔹 Meeting Governance & Stakeholder Management

• Own and facilitate Weekly Status Reviews (WSR) — preparing agenda, capturing minutes, tracking action items to closure, and distributing updates to all stakeholders within 24 hours.
• Lead Steering Committee meetings — preparing executive-level briefing decks, presenting program health using RAG (Red/Amber/Green) status, and driving decisions on escalated risks and issues.
• Chair Sprint Reviews, Sprint Planning, and retrospective ceremonies in coordination with the Scrum Master, ensuring business stakeholders are engaged and aligned.
• Facilitate Executive Briefings and Client QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews) with structured agendas, performance metrics, and forward-looking roadmaps.
• Run cross-workstream dependency meetings, integration checkpoints, and go/no-go readiness reviews ahead of major milestones.
• Maintain a stakeholder engagement plan mapping communication frequency, channel, and format to each stakeholder group.
• Act as the primary escalation point for client and internal stakeholders — triaging issues, driving resolution, and communicating outcomes clearly.
• Coordinate onboarding and offboarding of team members, managing resource transition documentation and knowledge handover.

🔹 RAG Status, Reporting & Project Controls

• Maintain accurate and up-to-date RAG (Red/Amber/Green) status across all project dimensions: Scope, Schedule, Budget, Resources, Risks, and Quality.
• Produce weekly and monthly Project Status Reports (PSR) that are concise, data-driven, and audience-appropriate — executive summaries for sponsors, detailed updates for delivery leads.
• Define and manage the project dashboard using tools such as Jira, Smartsheet, MS Project, or Salesforce’s own project management apps.
• Track and report against project KPIs: sprint velocity, defect escape rate, UAT pass rates, deployment frequency, and milestone adherence.
• Leverage AI tools (Claude, Copilot) to auto-summarize sprint data, generate status report drafts, and surface anomalies in project metrics.
• Maintain a Change Request (CR) log — tracking scope changes, impact assessments, approvals, and budget adjustments through the formal change control process.
• Produce a consolidated program-level view across workstreams (technical, functional, integration, data migration, training, hypercare) for leadership consumption.

🔹 Risk Matrix, RAID Log & Documentation

• Own and maintain the RAID Log (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies) — ensuring each item has an owner, mitigation/action plan, target resolution date, and current status.
• Produce and update the Risk Matrix — categorizing risks by probability and impact, assigning risk owners, and tracking mitigation actions to closure.
• Maintain the Issues Register — escalating blockers with defined SLAs, tracking resolution progress, and documenting root cause analysis for significant issues.
• Manage the Assumptions Log and Decisions Register — ensuring all project assumptions are validated over time and key decisions are documented with rationale and stakeholder sign-off.
• Maintain comprehensive project documentation artefacts: Project Charter, Project Management Plan, Communication Plan, Resource Plan, and Release Plan.
• Own the project’s WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) prioritization log in collaboration with the BA and Technical Lead.
• Maintain the Lessons Learned repository, capturing insights at the end of each phase and sprint retrospective for continuous improvement.
• Ensure all documentation is version-controlled, stored in the agreed repository (Confluence, SharePoint, or Salesforce Files), and accessible to the right stakeholders.
• Use Claude or similar AI assistants to generate first drafts of risk mitigation plans, meeting minutes, and status narratives — reviewing and refining before distribution.

🔹 Delivery Management & Program Oversight

• Manage project scope, schedule, and budget — maintaining the project baseline and tracking actuals against plan using Earned Value Management (EVM) principles.
• Develop and maintain the Master Project Schedule (MPS) — including workstream timelines, critical path analysis, milestone dependencies, and resource allocation.
• Lead the project through key delivery gates: Discovery sign-off, Design approval, Build completion, UAT entry/exit, Go-Live readiness, and Hypercare closure.
• Coordinate resource planning across onshore/offshore delivery teams, managing utilization, allocation conflicts, and capacity forecasting.
• Drive the Go-Live readiness checklist — ensuring all technical, functional, training, and operational readiness criteria are met before cutover.
• Manage vendor and third-party dependencies — tracking SLAs, escalating delivery risks, and maintaining contractual compliance.
• Own the Hypercare plan post go-live — defining support SLAs, tracking incident resolution, and planning the transition to BAU (Business as Usual) support.

🔹 Required Skills & Experience

• 5+ years of project management experience on Salesforce implementations or enterprise CRM/SaaS programs.
• PMP (Project Management Professional), PRINCE2, or equivalent certification strongly preferred.
• Proven track record managing WSR, Steering Committee, and executive reporting cycles on programs of M+ budget.
• Expert proficiency in RAID log management, risk matrices, and project controls documentation.
• Experience with agile and hybrid delivery methodologies — Scrum, SAFe, Waterfall, and blended approaches.
• Strong working knowledge of Salesforce platform concepts: clouds, orgs, releases, deployment cycles — enough to have credible technical conversations.
• Proficiency in project management tools: Jira, Confluence, Smartsheet, MS Project, or equivalent.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills — able to adapt messaging from developer to C-suite.
• Financial management experience: budget tracking, forecasting, invoice reconciliation, and resource cost modeling.
• Experience managing multi-vendor, multi-geography delivery teams in onshore/offshore models.

🔹 AI & Tool Proficiency

• Claude / ChatGPT: Generating status report drafts, meeting summaries, risk narrative text, and action item extraction from meeting transcripts.
• Agentforce Awareness: Understanding agent-based automation capabilities to identify opportunities to streamline project admin tasks.
• Copilot for M365: Using AI-assisted drafting in Word, PowerPoint, and Teams for project communications and executive decks.
• Jira / Confluence AI: Automated sprint summaries, backlog insights, and document generation.
• Data Analysis: Using AI tools to surface trends in project velocity, defect rates, and risk exposure from project data.

🔹 Industry Domain Knowledge – knowing 1 is mandatory

• Healthcare: Understanding of HIPAA compliance timelines, clinical system integration dependencies, regulatory submission milestones, and patient data governance constraints on project planning.
• Hi-Tech: Fast-paced release cycles, global rollout complexity, partner portal launch coordination, and multi-region compliance checkpoints.
• Manufacturing: ERP integration dependencies (SAP, Oracle), plant go-live sequencing, change management complexity, and operational readiness in production environments.

🔹 Nice to Have

• Salesforce certifications: Admin, Business Analyst, or Project Management app experience.
• CSM (Certified Scrum Master) or SAFe Agilist certification.
• Experience with Copado, Gearset, or Flosum release management — understanding deployment pipelines from a governance perspective.
• Familiarity with CRM Analytics / Tableau for building self-serve project health dashboards.
• MBA or equivalent advanced business education.