Program Manager SWUS upgrades

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About the role
We are looking for an experienced Program Manager to lead end-to-end Software Upgrade Subscription (SWUS) upgrade programs for strategic customers. The role will be accountable for converting upgrade commitments into safe, predictable, and commercially sound delivery outcomes across planning, technical readiness, execution, testing, customer acceptance, and handover.
The successful candidate will work across customer, product, engineering, service delivery, operations, commercial, and partner teams. They will create clarity in complex, multi-dependency environments and ensure that upgrade programs are delivered with strong governance, transparent communication, disciplined change control, and a relentless focus on customer value.
Key responsibilities
Program ownership and delivery
• Own the integrated program plan from initiation through final acceptance and closure.
• Translate SWUS commitments, customer priorities, product roadmaps, and maintenance lifecycle needs into a clear upgrade roadmap and executable delivery plan.
• Establish delivery milestones, critical paths, dependencies, resource plans, governance forums, and decision points.
• Coordinate multiple upgrade workstreams across cloud infrastructure, core network functions, virtualized network functions, platform components, and associated operational activities, as applicable to the customer scope.
• Drive readiness reviews, pre-checks, implementation planning, maintenance-window coordination, testing, ATP, traffic migration, handover, and closure activities.
• Ensure that delivery teams follow approved methods of procedure, quality gates, security requirements, and operational acceptance criteria.
Customer and stakeholder leadership
• Act as the primary program interface for customer stakeholders, account teams, service delivery managers, technical leads, and internal executives.
• Establish a predictable communication rhythm through kickoff meetings, weekly status reviews, steering committees, risk reviews, and executive updates.
• Present concise, fact-based views of progress, risks, decisions required, financial position, and next steps.
• Build trust by setting realistic expectations, escalating early, and ensuring that commitments are owned and followed through.
• Facilitate alignment when customer priorities, technical constraints, commercial boundaries, or delivery capacity are in tension.
Service delivery and commercial accountability
• Ensure contractual fulfillment and manage customer expectations throughout the upgrade lifecycle.
• Support contract establishment, renewals, service-level commitments, and the development of the Service Level Agreement and Procedures Manual with the customer.
• Act as the escalation point for customer and internal delivery issues, ensuring timely ownership, communication, and resolution.
• Secure contract margins through disciplined cost, budget, resource, and forecast management.
• Provide inputs for resource dimensioning, capacity planning, and competence planning.
• Partner with the account team to identify, qualify, and prioritize add-on sales and value-creation opportunities.
• Communicate effectively with customers and ensure that actions, decisions, and commitments receive adequate follow-up.
• Facilitate knowledge sharing and adoption of Ericsson service delivery models, strategies, portfolio capabilities, and best practices.
Risk, issue, and change management
• Maintain an integrated RAID log covering risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies, and decisions.
• Identify upgrade risks early, including release compatibility, lab availability, production-readiness gaps, customer dependencies, resource constraints, service impact, and schedule compression.
• Define mitigation and contingency plans with clear owners and due dates.
• Govern scope changes through the appropriate change-request and change-control-board processes.
• Protect the baseline plan and commercial position by identifying scope creep, out-of-scope requests, and cost or schedule impacts before commitments are made.
• Lead structured lessons-learned reviews and ensure that improvement actions are carried into future upgrade programs.
Financial and operational governance
• Track program financials, forecast, resource utilization, third-party costs, and delivery efficiency.
• Ensure that invoicing, acceptance milestones, purchase-order dependencies, and commercial obligations are visible and actively managed.
• Drive delivery decisions that balance customer outcomes, quality, risk, time, and cost.
• Promote reuse of proven assets, standard methods, automation opportunities, and factory or delivery-model efficiencies.
• Maintain accurate program documentation, including the project charter, integrated plan, status reports, decision log, acceptance evidence, and final report.
Required qualifications and experience
• Bachelor's degree in engineering, technology, business, or a related discipline; a postgraduate qualification is an advantage.
• Typically 8-12 years of experience in telecommunications, IT infrastructure, cloud, network transformation, software delivery, or a comparable technology environment.
• Demonstrated experience managing complex, customer-facing programs with multiple technical workstreams and geographically distributed teams.
• Strong experience in software upgrade, network modernization, release management, migration, integration, or managed-service delivery programs.
• Working knowledge of telecom core networks, cloud infrastructure, virtualized or containerized network functions, OSS/BSS environments, or adjacent technology domains.
• Proven experience with integrated planning, dependency management, RAID governance, change control, financial tracking, executive reporting, and customer-facing service governance.
• Experience managing SLAs, contractual commitments, budgets, margins, escalations, and customer success outcomes is preferred.
• Experience working with structured project governance frameworks and delivery methodologies such as XLPM, PMI, PRINCE2, Agile, or hybrid models.
• Program or project management certification is preferred.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.
Last date to apply : 11th September 2026
Why join Ericsson?
At Ericsson, you'll have an outstanding opportunity. The chance to use your skills and imagination to push the boundaries of what's possible. To build solutions never seen before to some of the world's toughest problems. You'll be challenged, but you won't be alone. You'll be joining a team of diverse innovators, all driven to go beyond the status quo to craft what comes next.
What happens once you apply?
Click Here to find all you need to know about what our typical hiring process looks like.
Encouraging a diverse and inclusive organization is core to our values at Ericsson, that's why we champion it in everything we do. We truly believe that by collaborating with people with different experiences we drive innovation, which is essential for our future growth. We encourage people from all backgrounds to apply and realize their full potential as part of our Ericsson team. Ericsson is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. learn more.
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Primary country and city: India (IN) || Gurgaon
Req ID: 789997
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