Senior Program Manager 2026P-0481
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Ascension is seeking a Senior Program Manager, Federal IT Modernization to lead planning, coordination, execution oversight, risk management, and stakeholder engagement for a federal enterprise document management modernization effort. The role will support a mission focused on moving from fragmented legacy document repositories toward a secure, cloud-native, multi-tenant document management platform capable of ingesting, indexing, securing, and reporting on very large volumes of legacy records.
This position is important because the customer’s effort involves multiple workstreams, including platform modernization, legacy system transition, records ingestion, data governance, reporting, cybersecurity alignment, and coordination among technical, business, security, and mission stakeholders. The ideal candidate will bring strong federal program management discipline, experience supporting IT modernization or cloud-based transformation efforts, and the ability to manage ambiguity while keeping teams aligned to schedule, scope, risk, quality, and customer expectations.
Summary of the Contractor Role
The Senior Program Manager will serve as the primary management lead responsible for coordinating modernization activities across multiple project teams and stakeholder groups. The customer’s requirement centers on establishing a cloud-native enterprise document management platform using JWCC-enabled capabilities, supporting ingestion and indexing of approximately 1.5 billion legacy microfiche-derived records, and preparing for future migration or subsumption of systems such as CEDMS-CDA and CEDMS-MSS. The RFI describes the need for OCR, indexing, search, secure access control, analytics, APIs, Zero Trust, records management, and future migration planning.
The ideal candidate should be a disciplined, organized, and self-driven program leader who can manage multiple workstreams in a complex federal environment. This person should be skilled at translating customer priorities into actionable plans, maintaining integrated schedules, tracking decisions and risks, preparing executive briefings, coordinating with technical subject matter experts, and ensuring deliverables are completed on time and aligned to customer expectations. Ascension’s GSA Project Manager III labor category aligns to this level because it directs multiple projects, manages quality, schedule, cost, and scope, leads client meetings, coordinates consultants, mitigates risks, and supports IT and program/portfolio management missions.
Expected Day-to-Day Activities
- Lead overall program coordination across modernization, ingestion, security, data, reporting, and stakeholder engagement workstreams.
- Develop and maintain an integrated master schedule, milestone tracker, risk register, issue log, action item tracker, and decision log.
- Coordinate meetings with client stakeholders, technical teams, business process owners, security representatives, records management stakeholders, and data/reporting leads.
- Translate customer objectives into practical execution plans, workstream charters, deliverable schedules, and status reporting formats.
- Monitor project performance against scope, schedule, quality, and customer priorities.
- Identify program risks related to data ingestion volume, legacy migration dependencies, security controls, user adoption, governance, and interface/API planning.
- Prepare executive briefings, status reports, meeting agendas, meeting summaries, dashboards, and leadership decision materials.
- Support requirements clarification for cloud-native document management, OCR/indexing, metadata strategy, role-based access, reporting, APIs, and records retention.
- Facilitate cross-functional discussions between business users, technical architects, cybersecurity leads, cloud/platform teams, and data analysts.
- Support change management planning for users transitioning from legacy document repositories to a modernized platform.
- Track deliverable quality and ensure work products are reviewed, version controlled, and ready for customer submission.
- Coordinate with Ascension leadership and teaming partners to ensure staffing, deliverables, and customer communications remain aligned.
- Apply project management methods such as PMBOK, Agile, risk management, stakeholder management, and quality control practices.
- Support contract compliance by tracking required deliverables, due dates, assumptions, dependencies, and customer approvals.
How to Apply
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| Job Category | Project Management |
| MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS | Master’s degree in business, information technology, public administration, management, engineering, computer science, or a related field. Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical topics to non-technical stakeholders. | Ability to work independently in an ambiguous environment with limited day-to-day supervision. | Ability to coordinate across technical, business, security, and customer-facing teams. |
| REQUIRED SKILLS | 12+ years of relevant experience in program management, project management, federal IT modernization, enterprise systems support, cloud transformation, data management, or mission support modernization. | Experience managing multiple project workstreams in a federal government or government contractor environment. | Demonstrated ability to manage scope, schedule, cost, quality, risks, issues, and deliverables. |
| TECHNICAL SKILLS | Experience using Microsoft 365, Teams, SharePoint, Excel, PowerPoint, and project tracking tools. |
| DESIRED QUALIFICATIONS | PMP certification strongly preferred. | Agile, Scrum, PMI-ACP, ITIL, CSM, SAFe, or related certification preferred. | Experience supporting DoD, defense finance, federal financial management, records management, document management systems, or cloud-based modernization efforts. | Familiarity with JWCC, IL5, FedRAMP, NIST, RMF, ICAM, Zero Trust, or federal cybersecurity compliance concepts. | Experience with Microsoft Power Platform, Power BI, ServiceNow, Jira, MS Project, Smartsheet, Tableau, or similar tools. | Experience supporting legacy system modernization, system migration planning, enterprise content management, or large-scale data ingestion initiatives. | Experience facilitating Integrated Project Teams, governance boards, executive reviews, and cross-agency working sessions. | Experience managing subcontractor or teaming partner coordination. | Strong ability to identify risks early, develop mitigation options, and communicate tradeoffs to leadership. |
| SUITABILITY/SECURITY REQUIREMENT | U.S. citizenship may be required based on the federal customer environment. | Ability to obtain and maintain the required federal suitability or clearance level. | Public Trust, Secret, or higher clearance may be required depending on final task order requirements. | Experience working in controlled federal environments is preferred. | Must be able to comply with customer security, privacy, records management, and information handling requirements. |