Program Manager

Role Overview

General Insurance and Motor Insurance

Key Responsibilities

Program Leadership and Governance

• Lead a multi-project program consisting of several concurrent IT projects in insurance or financial technology domains.

• Must have hands-on experience managing application development projects

• Establish program governance frameworks, reporting structures, and delivery standards.
• Ensure compliance with financial services regulatory requirements such as AML, PCI-DSS, and MAS/BNM guidelines.

Planning and Delivery Management

• Develop and maintain integrated program plans including timelines, dependencies, resources, risks, and budgets.
• Monitor project progress and drive corrective actions to address issues, delays, or deviations.
• Coordinate cross-functional teams including business analysts, developers, QA, infrastructure, security, and vendors.
• Facilitate decision-making across stakeholders and escalate critical issues when required.

Stakeholder Engagement

• Act as the primary point of contact for senior leadership and business sponsors.
• Present program status, dashboards, financial updates, and risk assessments.
• Build strong relationships with business units, operations teams, compliance, technology leads, and vendors.

Risk, Compliance and Quality Assurance

• Identify, assess, and manage program-level risks, dependencies, and constraints.
• Ensure deliverables comply with internal policies, cybersecurity standards, and regulatory expectations.
• Conduct program reviews, retrospectives, and continuous improvement initiatives.

Financial and Resource Management

• Manage program budget planning, forecasting, and cost control.
• Optimize resource allocation across projects.
• Support procurement and vendor management including contract negotiation and performance evaluation.

Qualifications and Requirements

Education and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in IT, Computer Science, Business, or related fields. Master’s degree is an advantage.
• Minimum 10 years of experience in IT project or program management.
• At least 5 years of experience in General and/or Motor Insurance domains.
• Experience in financial services (banking, insurance, fintech, payments) is required

Technical and Domain Skills

• Strong understanding of SDLC methodologies such as Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, and Hybrid.
• Knowledge of financial systems including core banking, digital channels, risk systems, or payment platforms.
• Familiarity with regulatory frameworks and cybersecurity standards in financial services.

Preferred Certifications

• PMP, PgMP, or PRINCE2
• Agile certifications such as CSM, SAFe, or PMI-ACP
• ITIL Foundation

Soft Skills

• Strong leadership and people management capabilities.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• High analytical, problem-solving, and decision-making ability.
• Ability to work in a demanding, fast-paced environment.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

• On-time, on-budget, and in-scope program delivery.
• Stakeholder satisfaction and realization of business value.
• Regulatory and audit compliance.
• Team performance and engagement.
• Effective risk mitigation and issue resolution.

Added Advantage

Modern Architecture and Engineering Concepts

• Understanding of microservices, APIs, and integration patterns.
• Familiarity with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and GCP, including migration strategies.
• Knowledge of containerization and orchestration tools such as Docker, Kubernetes, or OpenShift.
• Awareness of DevOps practices including CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code.
• Knowledge of application performance, scalability, and resilience concepts.
• Experience working with modern and legacy programming stacks including Java, .NET, COBOL, and mainframe.

Legacy Systems and Transformation

• Understanding of monolithic architectures and technical debt.
• Experience with data migration, schema changes, and modernization of integration layers.
• Ability to work with SMEs to define modernization paths and phased migrations.

Strategic Planning for Modernization

• Ability to define multi-year modernization roadmaps.
• Experience leading large-scale application modernization or digital transformation programs.
• Skills in managing dependencies, sequencing workloads, and planning phased rollouts.
• Capability to handle risks around legacy instability, cutover planning, and downtime avoidance.
• Ability to facilitate cross-team coordination through Scrum-of-Scrums, dependency mapping, and synchronized sprint planning.