Guest Services and Reservation System Manager

The Department of Natural Resources encourages all applicants to upload a current resume and cover letter to their online application. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Parks, Forests, and Preserves Bureau is seeking a driven, analytical, and highly collaborative professional to serve as our Guest Services and Reservation System Manager **(Program Planner 3)**. If you are looking for a purposeful career where your daily work directly impacts the lives of millions of Iowans, this is your opportunity. In this role, you will become the heartbeat of Iowa's state park accessibility, ensuring that families across the state can seamlessly connect with nature, camp, and recreate. By joining our team, you will contribute directly to our shared mission to conserve and enhance our natural resources in cooperation with individuals and organizations, improving the quality of life in Iowa and ensuring a vibrant outdoor legacy for future generations. We know that to successfully take care of Iowa's natural resources, we must first take care of our people. The DNR prides itself on cultivating a professional yet deeply family-friendly environment that actively supports a healthy work-life balance. This position offers a highly predictable and stable Monday through Friday schedule from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM, ensuring your evenings and most weekends remain your own to spend with loved ones. Within this supportive agency culture, you will enjoy a high degree of operational autonomy, professional growth opportunities, and the satisfaction of knowing your talents serve a distinct public good. Core Responsibilities and Daily Work Operating with significant independence, you will serve as the statewide technical authority and lead contract manager for Iowa’s fully digital, 100% reservable campground and facility reservation system. In this capacity, you will manage the comprehensive contract lifecycle, direct vendor compliance, and formulate dynamic business rules to adapt to shifting market influences. Your primary fiscal duties will include auditing complex monthly vendor invoices and exercising independent oversight to authorize non-standard customer refunds. Additionally, you will coordinate critical campground modernization projects across the state, strategically managing the acquisition and field deployment of IT hardware to establish public Wi-Fi networks. As a key administrative strategist, you will also formulate official agency positions on high-profile public inquiries, draft formal language for the Iowa Administrative Rulemaking process, and deliver presentations to the Natural Resources Commission (NRC) and the Administrative Rules Review Committee (ARRC). Beyond high-level contract administration, you will champion platform optimization and field staff empowerment. You will lead intra-bureau work groups to systematically evaluate platform user interfaces and conduct rigorous backend user-acceptance testing (UAT) on system updates, fixes, and alerts prior to public deployment. To ensure our field teams are fully supported, you will author and maintain the official Centralized Reservation System Operating Policies and Procedures manual, identify staff training needs, and produce instructional resources. Your administrative oversight will also extend to essential compliance programs, where you will act as the bureau administrator for pesticide licensing renewals and mandatory Human Trafficking prevention training records. Collaboration is a core element of this position. You will partner closely with the Communications Bureau to guide public information strategies, manage digital publication schedules, and technically validate promotional codes within the reservation platform. To keep Iowa aligned with broader outdoor recreation trends, you will also integrate multi-source operational data to compile our state's annual park statistics for regional and national benchmarking, providing finalized datasets for the National Associat…