Senior Project Manager - Mortgage and Financial Systems Implementation

Title: Senior Project Manager – Mortgage & Financial Systems Implementation

Location: Helena, MT Information Technology

Job Description:
Industry: Public Sector / Housing Finance / Financial Services
Location: Montana / Hybrid or Remote with Travel as Required
Employment Type: Contract
Project: Enterprise Financial, Mortgage & Loan Servicing System Implementation and Migration

Position Overview
We are seeking a senior Project Manager with deep experience leading large-scale financial, mortgage, or loan servicing system implementations and migrations.
This individual will serve as the client-side project leader and day-to-day representative for a major technology modernization initiative involving system replacement, data migration, testing, user acceptance testing, vendor coordination, go-live, and post-implementation stabilization.
This is not a software-vendor implementation role. The Project Manager must be capable of representing the client’s interests, challenging vendor assumptions, managing risks and dependencies, maintaining executive-level transparency, and ensuring the implementation remains aligned with business, financial, regulatory, and operational requirements.
The successful candidate should have direct experience delivering complex system implementations within mortgage banking, loan servicing, accounting, financial services, housing finance, or a similarly regulated environment.

Performance Objective
Successfully lead the end-to-end implementation and migration of a mission-critical financial and/or mortgage servicing platform from planning through production stabilization, while maintaining strong project governance, data integrity, vendor accountability, user readiness, and executive visibility.

What Success Looks Like
First 30 Days – Establish Control and Validate the Program
The Project Manager will:

• Assess the current project status, implementation plan, business requirements, vendor commitments, dependencies, and risks.
• Validate project scope, milestones, deliverables, assumptions, and resource requirements.
• Establish or refine the integrated project plan.
• Create clear project governance and decision-making processes.
• Establish RAID management for risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies.
• Review existing business requirements and future-state process documentation.
• Identify gaps requiring clarification or controlled change.
• Establish executive status reporting and project communication cadence.
• Assess software vendor schedules and identify unrealistic timelines or dependencies.
• Confirm data migration, testing, UAT, and cutover strategies.

First 60 Days – Drive Migration, Vendor Management, and Testing Readiness
The Project Manager will:

• Coordinate the software vendor, Agency personnel, technical resources, and third parties.
• Hold vendors accountable for milestones, defects, deliverables, and commitments.
• Drive resolution of schedule slippage and implementation issues.
• Oversee data migration planning and conversion activities.
• Ensure source-to-target reconciliation requirements are established.
• Coordinate trial data migrations and data-quality remediation.
• Develop or oversee the UAT plan.
• Prepare business users to participate effectively in formal UAT.
• Establish defect tracking, prioritization, ownership, and resolution processes.
• Ensure financial controls and reporting dependencies are addressed.

First 90 Days and Beyond – Prepare for Go-Live
The Project Manager will:

• Drive completion of testing and UAT.
• Monitor migration quality and reconciliation results.
• Establish objective go-live entry and exit criteria.
• Provide evidence-based go-live readiness recommendations.
• Coordinate production cutover planning.
• Manage business and operational readiness.
• Coordinate training, documentation, and SOP completion.
• Manage vendor and internal issue resolution through go-live.
• Provide executive reporting on risks, defects, readiness, and decisions.
• Lead or coordinate post-production stabilization.
• Measure user adoption and identify corrective actions where necessary.

The underlying CEP specifically emphasizes full lifecycle delivery including planning, configuration, migration, testing, UAT, go-live, and stabilization.

Responsibilities
Enterprise Project Leadership
Lead a complex enterprise software replacement or migration initiative from planning through production.
Responsibilities include:

• Integrated project planning
• Milestone management
• Scope management
• Resource planning
• Dependency management
• Risk and issue management
• Executive reporting
• Governance
• Change control
• Go-live readiness
• Production stabilization

Financial and Mortgage Systems
The Project Manager should understand the business impact of technology changes across financial and mortgage processes, including:

• General ledger postings
• Reconciliations
• Month-end processing
• Year-end processing
• Financial reporting
• Internal controls
• Loan boarding
• Payment application
• Escrow
• Payoff processing
• Refinancing
• Loan servicing operations

The client explicitly requires experience or aptitude across accounting, mortgage banking, and loan servicing processes.

Vendor Management
Act as the client’s representative when coordinating with software vendors and implementation partners.
The Project Manager must be able to:

• Challenge unrealistic vendor schedules
• Challenge scope assumptions
• Track vendor commitments
• Escalate performance concerns
• Manage defects
• Resolve schedule slippage
• Drive accountability
• Maintain vendor performance reporting
• Facilitate executive escalation where necessary

The Agency specifically wants demonstrated examples of holding vendors accountable and driving resolution of defects and schedule slippage.

Data Migration
Work closely with the Data Migration Lead and technical teams to oversee:

• Legacy data analysis
• Source-to-target mapping
• Migration planning
• Trial conversions
• Data validation
• Source reconciliation
• Data-quality remediation
• Cutover planning
• Production migration
• Post-migration validation

Prior experience migrating financial, mortgage, or loan servicing data is highly desirable.

Testing and UAT
Lead or oversee:

• Test planning
• UAT planning
• Business-user participation
• Test scheduling
• Defect capture
• Defect prioritization
• Defect resolution
• Entry/exit criteria
• Readiness assessment

The Project Manager should be comfortable working with business users who may have limited experience with structured UAT.

Change Management and Adoption
Coordinate business readiness activities including:

• Change-management planning
• Communications
• Training
• User documentation
• Standard operating procedures
• Internal-control documentation
• Audit readiness
• Adoption measurement
• Post-go-live adoption support

These activities are an explicit part of the engagement.

Required Experience
Ideal candidates should have:

• 10+ years of project or program management experience
• Experience leading major enterprise system implementations or migrations
• Experience through the complete implementation lifecycle
• Financial systems implementation experience
• Mortgage banking, mortgage servicing, loan servicing, or comparable financial-platform experience
• Client-side or owner’s-representative project management experience
• Vendor and system-integrator management experience
• Data migration oversight experience
• Testing and UAT leadership
• Cutover and go-live experience
• Executive status reporting
• RAID management
• Change control
• Strong stakeholder-management skills

Preferred Experience
Preference should be given to candidates with:

• Housing Finance Agency experience
• State or local government experience
• Public-sector financial systems
• Mortgage servicing platforms
• Loan servicing platforms
• Accounting / ERP implementations
• Highly regulated financial environments
• Data governance
• System integration
• Internal controls
• Audit-readiness experience

The CEP specifically calls out experience with Housing Finance Agencies or similar public-sector organizations, data migration, governance, integration, and project management methodologies.

Preferred:

• PMP – Project Management Professional

Ideal Candidate Profile
They should have personally led at least one significant migration or replacement involving a mortgage servicing, loan servicing, banking, accounting, or financial platform.
They should be able to speak specifically about:
What system they replaced → what they migrated to → their personal role → number of users or records → vendor involved → migration approach → testing strategy → major risks → go-live result.