Mid Market Program Manager

Harbor IT is a leading Managed Service Provider (MSP) specializing in delivering cutting edge Cybersecurity, IT, and Cloud Services to a diverse portfolio of clients. We pride ourselves on our commitment to excellence, innovation, and customer satisfaction. Harbor IT is backed by investment firm Worklyn Partners since 2022 and has built a national platform through acquisition and rapid organic growth. Our mission is to manage our clients’ technology and mitigate their cyber risks, so that they don’t have to.

The Mid-Market Program Manager owns the end-to-end operational performance of Harbor IT's mid-market POD: the clients in it, the delivery staff who serve them, the projects running inside it, and the service delivery workflows that hold it together. This is a true operational leadership role. The Program Manager sets the standard, builds the playbook, and holds the team accountable to it. This is a foundational hire. The POD is being stood up ahead of a significant mid-market client coming online, and the person in this seat is expected to arrive with proven MSP/IT practices and install them, not wait to be handed a process. They will directly manage the POD's Service Delivery Managers, Technical Leads, and support staff; own service quality and SLA attainment; run the POD's PMO and project delivery; own PSA data integrity and the financial inputs of delivery; and carry renewal accountability for the POD book. This role demands a results-oriented operator: someone who holds the team to timelines, enforces standards without apology, and drives outcomes rather than consensus. We do not want a yes-man. We want someone who will push back when the work is not up to standard and own the result either way. The metrics at the end of this document are the job, not an appendix to it.

Organizational Structure

Harbor IT is organized into Practices, which are vertical groupings aligned to client segment: Healthcare, Critical Infrastructure, and Private Equity. Each Practice contains multiple PODs, which are tightly focused delivery units responsible for a defined client set. The POD is the core operating unit of the business. This role leads the mid-market POD and reports into its Practice.

The Mid-Market Program Manager reports directly to the Practice Director, who oversees all PODs within the Practice and is accountable for Practice-level performance and client retention.

Each POD also includes a POD-CIO (virtual CIO, the senior client-facing executive technology partner) and a CSM (Client Success Manager). Neither reports to the Mid-Market Program Manager. The POD-CIO owns executive client relationships, strategic IT roadmaps, and expansion positioning. The CSM handles day-to-day client operations and satisfaction. The Program Manager owns renewal execution and a defined renewal target for the POD book, with pricing and discount authority within limits set by leadership, and is jointly accountable with the POD-CIO for expansion attainment. The Program Manager and POD-CIO are expected to operate in lockstep, aligned daily on client health, escalations, at-risk accounts, and service quality. A breakdown in that partnership will surface immediately in client outcomes.

Ownership boundaries:

• Practice Director: Practice-level performance across all PODs, client retention at the Practice level, and the Program Manager's performance.
• Mid-Market Program Manager: POD delivery performance, SLA and KPI attainment, the delivery team, the POD's PMO and project outcomes, PSA data integrity, delivery margin inputs, and renewal execution.
• POD-CIO: Executive client relationships, strategic IT roadmap, technology standards guidance, and expansion positioning.
• CSM: Day-to-day client operations, satisfaction signals, and routine client communication.

Key Responsibilities:

• Manage and lead the pod's Service Delivery Managers, Technical Leads, and support staff, including hiring, performance management, coaching, and day-to-day workload assignment.
• Own service quality for the POD: monitor service levels and enforce compliance with contractual SLAs and KPIs, and define the measurement where it does not yet exist.
• Own end-to-end delivery of projects within the pod, including scoping, planning, resourcing, and budget tracking, from kickoff through closeout.
• Own queue health for the POD: ticket aging, backlog disposition, escalation rates, reopen rates, and first contact resolution. Review the backlog weekly and disposition every aged ticket.
• Own PSA hygiene for the POD: enforce ticket quality standards (notes, categorization, resolution documentation), time entry accuracy and timeliness, and correct work type classification. The Program Manager is accountable if the data in the PSA is wrong.
• Own the financial inputs of POD delivery: drive delivery staff utilization to target, enforce 95 percent or better time entry accuracy, manage agreement utilization, identify out-of-scope billing opportunities, and ensure contract compliance. This role directly impacts service margin.
• Build and maintain service delivery SOPs, escalation playbooks, ticket handling standards, and onboarding documentation for the POD. This role is expected to create operational structure, not inherit it.
• Analyze ticketing and incident trends, identify root causes, and drive remediation through proactive service improvement, delivering a defined number of CSI (continual service improvement) actions each quarter.
• Own client communication during major incidents, planned maintenance, and other impactful events, and own the post-incident RCA and follow-through on corrective actions.
• Maintain a current performance scorecard for every direct report, with individual metrics that ladder up to POD-level KPIs, and conduct regular 1:1s, performance reviews, and accountability conversations.
• Serve as the leader of PMO for the pod, establishing and enforcing consistent project management standards, templates, and reporting across all active pod projects.
• Compliment the CX function, partnering on the cadence of client touchpoints and relationship health signals such as CSAT and NPS, and jointly driving proactive action on at-risk accounts.
• Join client SBRs and project status reviews for the pod's mid-market accounts, packaging performance, project, and relationship data into a single client-facing narrative.
• Monitor program and project-level performance metrics, ticket queues, and incident trends across the pod, and escalate risks before they affect delivery or the client relationship.
• Act as the senior escalation point for project, technical, and client issues within the pod and following proper escalation path when an issue exceeds pod-level authority.
• Partner with other departments on scoping new project work, contract renewals, and onboarding new mid-market clients into the pod.
• Track project and program budgets, resource allocation, and utilization across the pod, and flag variances to leadership.
• Apply ITIL-aligned processes and Harbor IT SOPs consistently across the pod's projects and service delivery, and drive continuous improvement across all disciplines in the pod.
• Maintain accurate project and program documentation, and keep the pod's SOPs current.

Qualifications & Skills:

• Proven people leadership as the formal manager of technical or service delivery staff, including hiring, performance reviews, and authority over formal performance improvement or termination decisions. MSP or IT services delivery experience required, not preferred.
• Experience managing both projects and ongoing service delivery in an MSP or IT services environment, supporting mid-market clients.
• Comfortable carrying commercial accountability, including renewal targets and pricing or discount decisions within defined limits.
• Working technical fluency sufficient to handle escalations and represent the POD credibly on technical matters, without needing to be the deepest specialist in the room.
• Working knowledge of project management methodology, such as waterfall or agile/hybrid approaches, as well as ITIL service management principles.
• Demonstrated experience owning client experience or relationship health metrics, such as CSAT, NPS, or SBR cadence, for a book of accounts, ideally in partnership with a Customer Success function.
• Strong organizational skills, with the ability to run multiple concurrent client projects while also managing a team's day-to-day performance.
• Comfortable interpreting service and project performance data and packaging it into clear, client-ready reporting.
• Demonstrated ownership of contractual SLA and KPI targets, including client-facing reporting against those targets and a specific example of recovering from a miss.
• Hands-on configuration or administration experience in a PSA or ITSM platform (ConnectWise, Autotask, HaloPSA, Kaseya BMS, ServiceNow, or comparable): ticket queues, SLA rules, workflows, and performance reporting. Not solely working tickets inside one.
• Track record of building service delivery frameworks, SOPs, or operational playbooks in an MSP environment, not just executing someone else's.
• Comfortable delivering hard messages to clients and to direct reports without softening them into mush, and willing to push back when work is not up to standard.
• Strong communication skills and executive presence, both client-facing and internal.
• Enough financial literacy to own program budgets, resource utilization, and a renewal or expansion number.
• Comfortable operating as a foundational hire in a fast-paced, growth-stage environment with an evolving scope.

Education & Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Business Administration, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• 6 to 8 years of experience combining program or project management with service delivery management within an MSP, MSSP, or IT services provider, including at least 2 years as the formal manager of technical or service delivery staff.
• PMP or CAPM preferred given ownership of the pod's PMO function.
• ITIL v4 Foundations certification a plus.
• Prior exposure to technical service delivery, such as NOC, help desk, or infrastructure support, a plus given the technical escalation scope of this role.

KPIs and Performance Metrics

These are the numbers this role is measured on, reviewed monthly with the Practice Director. Baselines are established in the first 60 days and targets are in force from the start of the second full quarter. Establishing the measurement itself is a Day 1 deliverable, not a reason to defer accountability.

1. Service Quality

• SLA attainment: 95 percent or better of tickets and incidents resolved within contractual SLA timeframes
• Clean resolution rate: 90 percent or better resolved without escalation or reopen
• Escalation rate: 10 percent or less of total tickets requiring Tier 2+ or urgent escalation
• First contact resolution: 70 percent or better

2. Operational Efficiency and Queue Health

• Aged ticket backlog: 5 percent or less of open tickets aged beyond SLA threshold
• RCA discipline: 98 percent or better of major incidents with a documented RCA within 5 business days
• CSI actions: 6 proactive service improvement actions per quarter
• Queue review: backlog reviewed and every aged ticket dispositioned weekly, 100 percent

3. PSA Hygiene and Financial Accuracy

• Time entry accuracy: 95 percent or better, correct work type, agreement, and time logged within SLA, measured weekly in the PSA
• Ticket quality score: 90 percent or better on a monthly sampled audit of notes, categorization, and resolution documentation
• Delivery staff utilization: 70 percent or better, measured weekly
• Out-of-scope capture: 100 percent identified and dispositioned, billed or documented as goodwill, within the month incurred

4. Program and Project Delivery

• Schedule performance: 90 percent or better of POD projects delivered within the approved schedule baseline
• Budget performance: 95 percent or better delivered within approved budget, plus or minus 5 percent variance
• PMO reporting compliance: 100 percent of active projects carrying a current status report in the standard template
• Closeout discipline: 90 percent or better closed out, including documentation, support handover, and client sign-off, within 10 business days of go-live

5. Client Experience

• CSAT: 95 percent or better positive on ticket and service review surveys
• NPS: greater than 50 across the POD book
• At-risk response: 100 percent of at-risk accounts with a documented save plan within 5 business days of being flagged. This is lead by POD-CIO but this person will rid shotgun and work with POD-CIO to delivery and be responsible for churn mitigation.

6. Retention and Growth

• Client retention: less than 3 percent of managed clients lost annually from the POD book
• Gross revenue retention: 95 percent or better renewal attainment against the POD book
• Expansion influence: 20 percent or better of POD clients adding new services annually, jointly with the POD-CIO

7. Team Leadership and Development

• Scorecard coverage: 100 percent of direct reports with a current documented scorecard and quarterly 1:1 cadence
• Team development: 100 percent of team members participating in ongoing training or improvement initiated by the

Program Manager

• Voluntary attrition: less than 15 percent on the POD delivery team annually

Work Environment:

• Primarily remote or hybrid, with occasional travel for client SBRs and internal meetings, typically 10 to 20 percent.
• Regular, high-frequency client-facing exposure across the pod's mid-market accounts, and a foundational role in standing up a new pod.
• Performance is reviewed monthly against the metrics above with the Practice Director.
• Core coverage during Eastern business hours, or the POD's designated coverage window.