Pan-American Life Insurance Group (PALIG) is seeking a bilingual (English/Spanish) Project Manager to lead strategic initiatives that support our finance, accounting, and operational functions across our domestic and international footprint. This role will oversee the planning and delivery of complex projects involving financial systems, process improvements, regulatory initiatives, and technology implementations, including ERP-related projects.
A key focus of this position will be partnering with Finance, Accounting, and business leadership teams on initiatives related to financial reporting requirements, helping ensure processes, systems, and reporting frameworks accurately support insurance accounting standards and financial transactions. The Project Manager will play a critical role in coordinating cross-functional efforts, driving implementation activities, and delivering solutions that strengthen financial reporting, operational effectiveness, and business performance. The Project Manager will drive projects from concept through implementation, ensuring solutions are delivered on time, within scope, and aligned with business objectives.
The ideal candidate combines strong project management expertise with experience supporting accounting, finance, financial systems, or finance transformation initiatives and is comfortable navigating complex stakeholder environments within a dynamic multinational organization.
ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS:
Project Initiation
- Participation in the inception of projects by identifying a solution to a business problem, elaborating a business case and project charter, and drafting the project budget, in collaboration with the main executive stakeholders
Project Planning
- Establish and support the objectives of the project
- Establish a top-level work breakdown structure (WBS) to identify the scope of work
- Establish and maintain the project plan (schedule) according to the life cycle of the project
- Identify and plan the resources that will be required for the software and hardware aspects of the project
- Plan the training required for the implementation of the product
- Identify and communicate milestones
- Obtain commitment from relevant stakeholders responsible for performing and supporting plan execution
- Plan and identify the involvement of stakeholders
- Proactively identify the needs of all stakeholders and take measures to meet or manage their expectations
- Lead meetings with team members to elicit and understand the requirements properly and ensure project expectations are clearly defined
- Lead the estimation of the work effort of the project
- Define strategies for optimizing resources, costs, and tasks
- Manage the risks, constraints and dependencies of the project
- Identify, document and prioritize risks, constraints, and dependencies
- Define strategies for the control of risks and dependencies
- Define contingency plans for risks
- Communicate risks and dependencies to the team and senior management
- Implement contingency plans until the risks are mitigated
- Support the business owner to obtain approval and hold a kick-off meeting
Project Execution
- Lead team follow-up meetings to review progress of tasks through their closure, risks, dependencies between activities, constraints, and priority changes; to facilitate decision making, ensure consistency among deliverables, plans, strategies, requirements and workflows of the project; and to establish and monitor the agreements and action items, collect and analyze the issues of the project, as well as determine the corrective actions that give closure to the identified issues, review the compliance and results of the selected milestones of the project, review internal and external commitments with senior management as appropriate, identify and evaluate the different alternatives to solve the problems, and select the lowest-impact solution
- Establish, communicate and execute the communication plan with the work team according to the characteristics of each project
- Executive Reports and status communication
- Resource Management: resource availability, review, and balancing
- Training and knowledge transfer
Monitoring & Control
- Ensure correct management of changes to project objectives and scope as needed
- Manage changes to requirements as they evolve, as well as maintain a history of changing requirements, including the reason for changes
- Evaluate the impact of requirement changes from the standpoint of relevant stakeholders
- Review work plans, activities, and work products to verify consistency with the requirements and the changes that have been made to them
- Generation and update of project Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Software Quality Assurance compliance
- Support Vendor Management
- Support the vendor Due Diligence process
- Monitor vendor activities proactively and take appropriate action as required
Project Closure
- Identify lessons learned
- Monitor project benefits realization
EDUCATION & EXPERIENCE:
- Bachelor’s degree in Accounting, Financial Administration, Business Industrial Engineering, Computer Science or a related field preferred
- CPA and / or MBA are a plus
- 5 years of Project Management experience is required
- An additional 4 years of relevant experience may be substituted in lieu of degree
- Bilingual in English and Spanish
- Experience implementing financial projects is desirable
- Project Management Professional (PMP) certification is preferred
- Ability to travel
KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS & ABILITIES:
- Experience leading ERP, financial systems, or Workday Financials implementation projects
- Knowledge or experience with regulatory standards and change initiatives
- Project Management, Agile Methodology, and Systems Development Life Cycle knowledge
- MS Project knowledge
- Leadership, teamwork, communication, proactivity, and problem-solving skills
- Knowledge of the insurance industry
- Basic knowledge of finance applications (desirable)
Pan-American Life Insurance Group Offers:
- Comprehensive Compensation Packages (base & bonus)
- Comprehensive Benefits Package: Medical, Dental, 401K, Paid Time Off, and Tuition Reimbursement (etc.) are some examples. New hires are eligible for medical and dental coverage on the first of the month following 30 days of service.
