Program Managers, Deputy Program Managers, Senior Project Managers & Project Managers (CBP)

The Work

What Success Looks Like

• Plans account for the change windows and site access constraints that actually govern the work, not the ones that are convenient to plan around.
• Dependencies between network, cloud, security, and field teams surface before they become a delay.
• Estimates come from the people doing the work, and get challenged rather than either accepted whole or overwritten.
• When a date moves, the customer hears it from you, with a reason and an option.

• Status reporting tells the customer something they can act on rather than a color that covers a problem.
• Risks appear on the register while there is still time to do something about them.
• The customer stops arranging side conversations to find out how the work is really going.
• What you report measures delivery rather than activity.

• Blockers get resolved at the lowest level that can resolve them, and escalate quickly when they cannot.
• Engineers spend their time on the work instead of chasing approvals, access, and equipment.
• Recurring administrative friction gets fixed at its source rather than absorbed again every month.

Where You'd Fit

• Project Manager. You own a project's scope, schedule, and delivery. You make routine sequencing and resourcing calls yourself and bring the ones with customer impact to a review.
• Cloud Project Manager. You own delivery of the cloud workstream, including its dependencies on security and accreditation. You decide sequencing across builds, migrations, and authorization milestones.
• Senior Project Manager. You take the projects that arrive without a clear path, including the ones already in trouble when you get them. Other project managers check their approach with you before committing to a date.
• Deputy Program Manager. You own a defined slice of the program full time and step into the Program Manager's authority when they are unavailable. Escalations that would otherwise reach the Program Manager come to you first, and most stop there.
• Program Manager. You own whether the program delivers as a whole, including commitments you inherited and work you do not directly manage. You are the customer's counterpart when something goes wrong.

What You Bring

• You have delivered technical work in a federal program where change control and accreditation set the pace.
• You have told a customer bad news early, and can describe how that conversation went and what it cost you.
• You have run delivery across teams you did not manage and had no authority over.
• You have taken over a project that was already behind and can say what you changed first.
• You hold an active CBP BI, a fitness determination at another DHS component, or an active DoD clearance. Any of these shortens your start date.
• You know enough about infrastructure, cloud, or security work to challenge an estimate without needing someone to translate it for you.
• PMP, agile delivery certifications, or equivalent are useful, but they are not a substitute for having delivered.

A note on timing

Employee Benefits