Manager, Project Manager

Our client is a growing manufacturer of engineered-to-order electrical equipment, providing electrical systems integration and worldwide service to industrial customers. The company is known for its focus on quality and operational excellence, and for building a work environment that supports employee development, success, and fulfillment.

We are looking for an experienced, customer-focused Manager, Project Management to lead the Project Management department and strengthen the discipline around customer order management, project status, communication, priorities, escalations, change impacts, approvals, documentation, and project portfolio visibility.

This is not a traditional project-control role — you won't own budgets, vendors, or contracts end to end. Instead, you'll lead a team that owns the customer relationship after the sale, driving orders through internal execution by building trust and influence across departments you don't directly manage. The role calls for someone who leads through relationships and accountability, not authority.

If you're a leader who builds trust fast, drives results through influence rather than formal authority, and brings strong customer focus, clear communication, and the ability to develop a high-performing team, we'd love to hear from you.

• Build trust quickly as a new leader — coach, develop, and support the team through change, creating a culture where people feel comfortable raising issues and confident in your follow-through.
• Lead the Project Management department by setting priorities, KPIs, communication standards, project status routines, escalation rules, workload expectations, training requirements, and accountability standards.
• Coach and develop Project Managers, Project Coordinators, and project support personnel while managing workload balance, performance, training, hiring, and succession needs.
• Build a Project Management team known for customer confidence, responsiveness, ownership, professional communication, status discipline, and respect for internal process ownership.
• Own project portfolio visibility by ensuring active projects have current status, risk owner, next action, customer communication record, internal owner, escalation path, and required due date.
• Set standards for customer communication related to order status, schedule risk, change impacts, approvals, documentation needs, customer decisions, ship commitments, recovery plans, and escalations.
• Lead hard ship date and customer-critical escalation discipline so risks are identified early, documented clearly, assigned to owners, and elevated when decisions exceed Project Management authority.
• Lead order handoff and change-management discipline, including scope clarity, customer contacts, contract requirements, submittals, drawing approvals, revision changes, customer change requests, schedule impacts, and documentation updates.
• Shape the quality, consistency, and credibility of customer communication across complex engineered-to-order projects.

• Ensure Project Management provides Planning with clear, actionable customer inputs including need dates, hard ship dates, priorities, holds, approvals, FAT or witness-test requirements, documentation needs, shipping constraints, and partial-ship approvals.
• Use confirmed Planning outputs factually, including production sequence, material readiness status, estimated completion, internal clear-to-ship determination, and recovery-plan information, without overriding Planning's schedule ownership.
• Lead Project Management alignment with weekly production planning and confirmation meetings by ensuring PM inputs are complete and current before Planning confirms internal status.
• Partner with Sales,…