Job SummaryAptive is seeking a Principal Program Manager to provide senior leadership, strategic direction, and operational oversight for a Department of Veterans Affairs health informatics and electronic health record modernization support program.
This role will lead multidisciplinary teams supporting program management, clinical informatics, Agile/SAFe delivery, stakeholder engagement, quality assurance, risk management, deliverable execution, and continuous process improvement across VA enterprise health informatics workstreams.
The ideal candidate brings deep VA/VHA health informatics experience, strong command of federal program delivery, and the ability to manage complex modernization efforts involving VistA/CPRS, Oracle Health/Cerner, clinical decision support, readiness, training, and implementation support.
Primary Responsibilities
- Serve as the primary program management lead and key client-facing point of contact for VA health informatics workstreams.
- Manage cost, schedule, performance, staffing, risk, quality, deliverables, and issue escalation across multiple concurrent workstreams.
- Lead program planning, kickoff, monthly status reporting, staffing roster updates, and project closeout activities.
- Guide Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe practices to support lean business case development, feature delivery, sprint ceremonies, retrospectives, and continuous improvement.
- Coordinate multidisciplinary SMEs, clinical informaticists, health systems specialists, analysts, and technical resources to support IHP, HITT, IRCP, CIOC, VistA/CPRS education/training, and related activities.
- Develop and maintain strong working relationships with Government leads, VA program offices, VAMC stakeholders, field informatics staff, and cross-functional contractor teams.
- Apply proactive risk, issue, and opportunity management to anticipate schedule, deployment, resource, and stakeholder impacts.
- Ensure deliverables are accurate, timely, high quality, compliant with client expectations, and aligned to program objectives.
Minimum Qualifications
- Master's degree in a relevant field; additional years of directly relevant experience may be considered for highly qualified candidates when contractually permissible.
- 15+ years of program or project management experience supporting large federal healthcare, health IT, or clinical informatics programs.
- 10+ years of experience managing complex programs for a federal agency or large corporation; VA/VHA experience strongly preferred.
- Experience managing a portfolio of diverse IT or health informatics projects, including cost, schedule, performance, risk, staffing, and quality management.
- Experience with SAFe Lean-Agile principles, Scrum/Agile delivery, and organizational change or operational excellence initiatives.
- PMP, Scrum Master, SAFe, or equivalent industry-recognized certification.
- Ability to obtain and maintain a public trust clearance.
- Legal authorization to work in the U.S.
Desired Qualifications
- Direct experience supporting VA Office of Health Informatics, CIDMO, FIS, EHRM, IHP, HITT, IRCP, CIOC, or VistA/CPRS-related programs.
- Experience leading clinical informatics teams or health IT modernization programs involving VistA/CPRS and Oracle Health/Cerner.
- Demonstrated ability to build consensus and coalitions across enterprise stakeholders and geographically dispersed teams.
- Strong writing, briefing, facilitation, and executive stakeholder management skills.
- Experience developing CPMPs, integrated master schedules, risk registers, monthly progress reports, staffing plans, operational guides, SOPs, dashboards, and quality review processes.
