Job PurposeThe DERMS Program Cutover Lead is responsible for developing and leading the end-to-end cutover and deployment approach for the DERMS program across Massachusetts and New York. The role coordinates the activities, dependencies, decisions, and stakeholder readiness required to transition the DERMS solution program successfully into production. This includes leading pre-cutover and cutover-day planning, developing and governing execution runbooks and readiness trackers, coordinating go-live communications and service transition, facilitating mock upgrades and directing go/no-go governance. The role works across stakeholder groups to confirm that technical, operational, business, and support prerequisites are complete. Following go-live, the role oversees early life support, lessons learned, and cutover closure to support a controlled transition into business-as-usual operations.
Key Accountabilities- Lead development, approval, and ongoing governance of the DERMS cutover and deployment approach for Massachusetts and New York, aligning technical execution with operational and business readiness.
- Perform the initial cutover stakeholder assessment and establish the governance, meeting cadence, decision rights, escalation paths, and cross-workstream handoffs needed to execute the transition.
- Develop, maintain, review, and secure approval of the pre-cutover and cutover-day runbooks, including task sequencing, owners, dependencies, entry and exit criteria, contingency actions, rollback considerations, and command-center procedures.
- Create and manage the cutover readiness tracker, integrating inputs from testing, infrastructure, cybersecurity, architecture, data, integrations, training, communications, business readiness, vendors, and operational teams.
- Define and obtain approval for the early life support and hypercare structure, including support coverage, issue triage, severity and escalation processes, operational ownership, performance monitoring, and exit criteria.
- Direct cutover-day execution across National Grid teams, DERMS vendor, the system integrator, business integrator, and other delivery partners, ensuring activities are completed in sequence and decisions and issues are documented in real time.
- Lead post-go-live stabilization, hypercare exit, and cutover closure, including closure reporting, lessons learned, outstanding-action ownership, and the formal transition to business-as-usual support.
Qualifications- Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Business, Project Management or related field required.
- At least 3 years of experience leading complex new technology programs, production deployments, system commissioning, service transitions, or enterprise go-live activities in a regulated or operationally critical environment required.
- Proven program management skills, including critical-path scheduling, risk and issue management, dependency coordination, executive reporting utilizing agile or traditional project management tools such as JIRA, JIRA align, or Microsoft Project required.
- Excellent facilitation, communication, negotiation, and stakeholder-management skills, with the ability to align cross-functional teams and remain decisive during high-pressure implementation windows while protecting safety, cybersecurity, system stability, customer impact, and operational continuity.
- Experience in DER management use cases such as flexible interconnections.
- Prior Utilities experience preferred.
- Prior experience in Solar, Energy Storage, or Electric Vehicles preferred.
More InformationSalary:MA: $156,000.00 - $175,000.00 USD annuallyUpstate NY: $139,000.00 - $163,000.00 USD annuallyNational Grid utilizes an assessment that evaluates the job qualifications/characteristics using AI or statistically based scoring. For more information, please view NYC Local Law 144.
This position has a career path which provides for advancement opportunities within and across bands as you develop and evolve in the position; gaining experience, expertise and acquiring and applying technical skills. Candidates will be assessed and provided offers against the minimum qualifications of this role and their individual experience.
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