Senior Project Manager

Role Overview

Seeking a highly skilled Senior Project or Program Manager to initiate and oversee a Program Management Organization (PMO) for a customer in western Virginia.

This role focuses on high-level PMO setup, client coordination, master scheduling, governance, and involvement with multi stakeholders for a complex portfolio which involves projects for infrastructure and natural resources. The position requires professional project management for land stewardship. Experience in natural resources and resource management is required.

This position will work closely with diverse client stakeholders and partner organizations. This role will establish the structure, cadence, tools, and reporting tools necessary to coordinate activities and work across multiple resource areas for field work and assist with leading partner efforts based on regulatory and planning timelines.

Position Type

Contract position with a base period with potential for extension.

Location & On-Site Requirement

Local presence within commuting distance of the designated project office is required.

On-site availability is a mandatory requirement for this position. This is a hybrid role that requires a consistent physical presence. The selected candidate must be located within commuting distance and able to work and attend meetings in person at the designated project office one to two times per week, or more frequently as required by project needs. Remote-only arrangements for this position are not available.

Core Responsibilities

1. PMO Setup, Governance & Portfolio Management

Establish the PMO Framework: Stand up, implement, and maintain a comprehensive, enterprise-level PMO structure tailored to support a high volume of concurrent projects.

Develop Governance Tools: Define and formulate the operational framework, PMO charter, reporting workflows, decision logs, escalation paths, and resource tracking plans.

Build and Maintain the Master Schedule: Develop and manage the master program schedule, deliverable calendar, action register, briefing cadence, and milestone tracker needed to monitor PMO progress, partner dependencies, regulatory timelines, and leadership decision points.

Portfolio Oversight: Direct and monitor the health, timelines, dependencies, and sequencing of a diverse portfolio of projects spanning infrastructure, roads, bridges, trails, facilities, recreation, fuels, timber, hydrology, watersheds, wildlife, and other natural resource management areas.

Risk & Issue Management: Establish formal issue-resolution paths, risk registers, change management processes, and escalation protocols to help keep the portfolio on schedule and support timely leadership decisions.

Executive Dashboard Coordination: Establish and maintain a centralized PMO dashboard that provides executive visibility into project status, milestone health, key performance indicators, resource needs, risks, issues, and spatial representation of program activities.

2. Client Coordination, Partnership Support & Leadership Engagement

Serve as Primary Liaison: Act as a primary face of the contract to federal agency leadership, maintaining strong alignment between contractor deliverables, agency expectations, and evolving program priorities through regular in-person and digital engagement.

Facilitate Interagency Partnerships: Coordinate and operationalize a common operating framework for multi-agency and partner-led initiatives involving federal, state, local, nonprofit, and private-sector stakeholders.

Support Senior Leadership Engagement: Plan, facilitate, and document strategic meetings and briefings for agency leadership and external partners, including clear action items, decisions, risks, next steps, and meeting minutes within required timeframes.

Coordinate Annual and Outyear Planning: Coordinate inputs for annual operating plans and multi-year plans of work with agency leadership, partner organizations, and supporting technical teams to maintain visibility into current-year and outyear priorities.

Maintain Meeting and Reporting Cadence: Develop, establish, and facilitate internal coordination meetings, external partner meetings, status briefings, and leadership updates needed to manage planned work.

Support Agreement and Funding Visibility: Track and coordinate information related to contracts, agreements, funding mechanisms, partner commitments, invoicing support, and other financial or administrative instruments without performing inherently governmental functions.

3. Compliance Tracking, Regulatory Integration & Planning Coordination

Milestone & Regulatory Tracking: Develop a systematic tracking mechanism to ensure project workflows account for critical regulatory, environmental planning, agreement, and partner-dependency timelines.

Land Management Planning Familiarity: Track relevant land management plan standards, planning requirements, and resource review dependencies that may affect project sequencing, prioritization, and implementation readiness.

Planning Coordination: Support the coordination of project planning inputs across program areas, including natural resources, engineering, recreation, transportation, hydrology, fuels, timber, wildlife, botany, heritage, and other affected disciplines.

Executive Reporting: Prepare monthly status reports, recurring briefing materials, written meeting notes, and dashboard inputs that identify accomplishments, risks, issues, proposed resolutions, upcoming activities, and decision needs.

4. Technical Cross-Coordination with Geospatial and Data Teams

Coordinate with Technical Specialists: Work alongside a dedicated team of data management professionals to support accomplishment reporting.

Translate Technical Inputs for Leadership: Enough familiarity and understanding to speak about project data and information related to decision-support concepts to communicate status, dependencies, and risks with client leadership and partner stakeholders.

Required Qualifications

Geographic Proximity & Availability: Must reside within commuting distance of the designated project office and possess the ability to attend in-person meetings one to two days per week, or more frequently as required.

Proven PMO Leadership: Extensive experience standing up a PMO from scratch, which include the creation of charters, governance structures, master schedules, portfolio tracking systems, reporting processes, risk registers, and executive dashboards for large-scale operations.

Senior Client Management Experience: Demonstrated ability to serve as a senior client-facing project or program manager in a complex government, public-sector, or multi-stakeholder environment.

Exceptional Stakeholder Coordination: Proven track record of managing complex client relationships and facilitating coordination among diverse federal, state, local, nonprofit, and private partners.

Process Familiarity: Strong foundational federal environmental compliance, specifically how planning timelines affect project execution, scheduling, decision-making, and implementation readiness.

Federal / State Framework Experience: Clear understanding of public agency organizational structures, leadership dynamics, decision-making workflows, documentation needs, and meeting discipline.

Executive Communication Skills: Strong written and verbal communication skills, with demonstrated ability to prepare leadership briefings, meeting summaries, status reports, action registers, and decision-support materials.

Portfolio and Schedule Discipline: Ability to track multiple concurrent projects, dependencies, timelines, deliverables, risks, and action items across a complex operating environment.

Highly Desired / Preferred Qualifications

Natural Resources & Land Management Background: Professional background or strong familiarity with natural resources, resource management, and federal or state land management activities, ideally with a federal or state public lands agency.

Public Land Agency Experience: Demonstrated experience working with public land management leadership, field units, interdisciplinary teams, senior leadership groups, or similar resource management organizations.

Technical Context: General familiarity or comfort speaking the language of GIS professionals, data managers, LiDAR specialists, engineers, environmental planners, or resource specialists is a plus.

Data and Information Literacy: Ability to understand how data supports decision tools to inform portfolio tracking, project prioritization, and accomplishments for client executives.

Planning and Agreement Coordination: Experience supporting annual operating plans, multi-year work plans, partner agreements, interagency coordination, funding workflows, or contract/agreement status tracking.

Large-Scale Program Coordination: Prior experience supporting high-visibility, multi-partner, time-sensitive federal or state land management programs is welcome but secondary to strong foundational PMO, stakeholder management, and public land management experience.