Project Manager, Teaching California

Description

The Position
The California Historical Society (CHS) is seeking candidates for a 2-year, term position as Project Manager, for Teaching California, a collaborative grant project funded by the State of California. Teaching California will offer California K-12 teachers and their students an innovative online collection of teaching resources. The Project Manager will, under the guidance of the CHS Director of Library and Collections, manage the full project delivery process, from determining scope to operational plan development to final outcomes. The incumbent will interface extensively with stakeholders, staff, and collaborative partners to foster beneficial relationships and achieve high quality results.
 
About Us
The California Historical Society (CHS) is a non-profit organization with a mission to inspire and empower people to make the state’s richly diverse past a meaningful part of their contemporary lives in order to create a more just and informed future. Founded in 1871, CHS maintains a premier collection of original materials documenting the history of California from the Spanish conquest to the present day. The CHS Collection represents the environmental, economic, social, political, and cultural heritage of the entire state, including materials from outside California that contribute to a greater understanding of the state and its people. Beginning with its founding, and especially since establishing its Yerba Buena District headquarters on Mission Street in 1995, CHS has served residents of the Bay Area, the state, and beyond with its research library, exhibitions, publications, and public educational programs that draw on its important and wide-ranging collections of California history.
 
About Teaching California
Through Teaching California, the California Historical Society in collaboration with its educational partner California History and Social Science Project (CHSSP) of U.C. Davis, will develop dynamic, expansive online curriculum composed of primary and secondary source materials, drawing upon its vast archival resources and those of the libraries across the state and nation. These resources will be carefully curated and tailored to provide K-12 teachers and students with online resources they need to analyze and understand the past. Critically, these materials will embody an interpretation of history that places California at the center of the study of the past by offering local and state examples of national and worldwide histories, highlighting the rich, varied, and impactful contributions of Californians.
 
The objective of the program is to ensure California’s large historical and archival resources are readily accessible to all K-12 students to foster better understanding of the state’s history, improve student literacy, and promote civic learning and engagement. The initiative creates a sustainable model for instructional material development in history-social science as well as other content areas. Teaching California will offer teachers and their students an innovative online collection of teaching resources, aligned with the new History-Social Science Framework, slated to be available in 2019.
 
Reporting to the Director of Library and Collections, and in close collaboration with CHS Library staff and Teaching California Partners, the successful incumbent will:

Serve as Project Manager for the Teaching California Project:

• Design and create an overarching plan for the project, in order to ensure that an end-to-end big picture plan is mapped out and understood by stakeholders. Articulate specific deliverables, timelines, interdependencies, deadlines, and resources needed.
• Facilitate periodic project meetings and engage with all parties to monitor project status, troubleshoot problems, and expedite solutions.
• Coordinate with CHS library staff to ensure that the external partners (CHSSP) have timely access to needed resources and content from CHS (e.g. primary sources, historical research).
• Produce project updates, progress reports, etc., in order to apprise stakeholders of agreements, timelines, and status of project. Identify impact of change to project plan and escalate issues as needed.
   

Serve as Lead for the development of the Teaching California website and ensure timely creation of website content:

• Work with project stakeholders to determine project goals and needs for the website and translate them into functional requirements.
• Manage the website development relationship with the vendor, including leading creation of a request for proposal (RFP), sourcing vendors, acting as primary liaison in development process, and managing overall vendor relationship and outcomes.
• Assist Director of Library and Collections in designing work plans that ensure targeted CHS collections are catalogued, processed, and digitized.
• Coordinate curriculum content development and delivery with CHSSP historians.

Successful candidates will have:

• Bachelor’s degree (in any field)
• 3-5 years relevant professional experience
• Strong expertise in organizing, planning, and managing projects, including ability to create and implement project plans and schedules, and successfully meet deadlines.
• Experience writing user stories or functional requirements for systems or website development, or other similar projects requiring gathering and synthesis of needs in order to identify technical specifications.
• Ability to handle multiple priorities, meet deadlines, and work calmly and capably under pressure. Able to perform well in fluid, changeable environments with fuzzy boundaries.
• Ability to work independently, and exercise discretion and sound judgment. Strong critical thinking, analysis, and problem-solving skills and adeptness at conducting research into project-related issues and products.
• Fluency in written and spoken English, with excellent written and verbal skills.
• Excellent interpersonal and social skills, including ability to communicate with and translate between technical and non-technical individuals. Able to work successfully in a multicultural, collaborative team environment.
• Demonstrated behaviors of taking initiative and focusing on results.
• Working knowledge of Microsoft Office, and collaborative tools (e.g. Google docs, Dropbox, Slack, etc.).

 
In addition, it would be great if you also have:

• MS/MLIS from an ALA-accredited institution, or BA in History, Education, Museum Studies or other relevant field of study.
• 1-3 years project management experience.
• Evidence of business analysis skills, e.g. requirements gathering, impact assessment, user acceptance testing, use case development, gap analysis.
• Experience working in a research library or archive, cultural heritage or educational environment, and/or in teaching, pedagogy, or curriculum development.
• Training in project management. Experience with project management structure and methods (e.g. project charters, planning and tracking templates) and tools (e.g., Basecamp, Asana, Trello).
• Previous experience creating and managing web content. Experience with user and acceptance testing.
• Spanish-language ability (reading, writing, speaking).
• Knowledge of California history.

Things you should know:
The California Historical Society is an Equal Opportunity Employer, deeply committed to diversity among its staff. This is a full-time exempt position with benefits including fully paid employee health, vision, dental, life, and AD&D, a generous holiday and time off policy, and a team full of interesting and warm people to work with. Position is based in San Francisco, and involves some overnight travel, evening and weekend work.
 
Interested candidates should submit a cover letter and resume or C.V. to sjordana@calhist.org. Resume review will begin immediately and continue until position is filled.