Senior Project Manager

THE ROLE: Senior Project Manager

The Senior Project Manager will play a key role in driving Kaplan Singapore's AI First and digital transformation agenda. This position oversees end-to-end project delivery across business systems, data, and AI-driven solutions — ensuring alignment with Kaplan's strategic priorities in student experience, operational efficiency, and innovation.

This is a critical senior role, and the role holder will need to demonstrate significant experience in managing, driving and delivering projects that directly impact business results. The role holder will work closely with senior leadership, and will therefore need to find the appropriate balance between influence, persuasion, collaboration and control in the management of scope, quality, budget, timelines and deliverables.

Key Responsibilities:

1. Project Planning & Delivery Leadership

• The core responsibility is to ensure successful end-to-end delivery of IT initiatives.
• Defining project scope, objectives, success criteria, and deliverables.
• Co-creating appropriate business cases in collaboration with project sponsors
• Creating and maintaining detailed project plans, resource plans, and schedules.
• Leading cross-functional project teams (e.g. engineering, data, security, architecture, vendors), both in-house, third party and cross-business.
• Tracking progress, managing dependencies, and ensuring quality outputs.
• Driving delivery using Agile, Waterfall, or hybrid methodologies depending on the project as defined by group PMO.

1. Stakeholder Management & Communication

• The Senior PM serves as the main bridge between technical teams and the wider business.
• Managing relationships with senior leaders, technical and business colleagues.
• Running appropriate governance to enable delivery of projects including project meetings, steering groups, stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives.
• Providing clear, concise communications — status reports, RAID logs, decision papers.
• Managing expectations and securing alignment on priorities and timelines.

1. Risk, Issue, and Dependency Management

• Critical in IT projects where complexity and interdependency are high.
• Identifying and assessing technical, operational, commercial, and security risks and working with Group Information Security and Compliance to ensure appropriate actions are taken throughout.
• Maintaining RAID logs and mitigation plans.
• Escalating issues proactively and leading resolution paths.
• Managing dependencies across systems, teams, vendors, and environments.

1. Budgeting & Financial Control

• Ensure projects deliver value and stay within financial boundaries.
• Creating and managing project budgets and cost forecasts.
• Handling procurement of software, infrastructure, and vendor services.
• Tracking spend vs budget and reporting variances and escalating where necessary.
• Supporting business cases and cost-benefit analyses.

1. Resource & Vendor Management

• Working with internal teams and third-party suppliers.
• Determining resource needs (developers, architects, analysts, QA, PMO support).
• Allocating tasks and balancing workloads across teams.
• Managing vendor contracts, SLAs, and performance.
• Coordinating external implementation partners.

1. Governance, Standards & Compliance

• Ensuring the project meets organisational, architectural, and regulatory requirements.
• Following IT governance, change management, and security processes.
• Collaborating with architecture, cybersecurity, and data governance teams.
• Ensuring compliance with GDPR, internal policies, and audit requirements.
• Maintaining documentation and delivering project artefacts.

1. Technical Understanding & Quality Assurance

• Ability to navigate system architecture, integrations, APIs, data flows, and environments.
• Ensuring testing plans (unit, system, UAT, penetration testing) are in place and executed.
• Coordinating cutover, deployment, and release management.
• Ensuring handover to support teams and completing service transition.

1. Change Management & User Adoption

• Working with the business to support communication, training, and adoption.
• Ensuring user readiness, documentation, and post-go-live support.
• Driving benefits realisation and measuring outcomes.

1. Continuous Improvement & Project Leadership

• Mentoring Project Managers and Business Analysts, and contributing to group PMO capability development.
• Embedding best practices in estimation, delivery frameworks, and tooling.
• Conducting retrospectives and applying lessons learned across programmes.

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Information Technology, or a related field (Master's degree or PMP/CBAP/PRINCE2 certification preferred).
• Minimum of 5-8 years of experience in project management, ideally in a complex or cross-functional environment.
• Proven track record in managing medium to large-scale projects from inception to completion.
• Strong understanding of project management frameworks (Agile, Waterfall, or Hybrid).
• Experience working with project management tools such as Microsoft Project, Asana, Jira, or equivalent.
• Desired but not required:
• Experience with Product Information Management (PIM)
• Experience in Salesforce and other Enterprise CRM platforms (e.g., Education Cloud, Service Cloud).
• Familiarity with Data Lakehouse environments (e.g., Databricks, AWS).

• Working Hours: Mondays to Fridays, 9am to 6pm
• Location: Singapore (Central Area: Dhoby Ghaut MRT/Little India MRT/Rochor MRT)