Senior Manager - Projects

Role Overview

Senior Manager - Projects at Al Ghurair. This role manages the end-to-end delivery of critical projects and changes, ensuring on-time, on-budget, and high-quality outcomes aligned to business needs. The Senior Manager leads stakeholders, vendors, and delivery teams to ensure programs, solutions, and projects are deployed safely with complete operational handover and measurable adoption.

Role Purpose

To own the delivery strategy, governance, and execution of assigned programs and application projects across the enterprise, ensuring alignment with business objectives, adherence to timelines and budgets, and successful operational transition with measurable business adoption.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy & Governance

• Own delivery strategy for assigned programs and projects, including GBS, ERP/CRM/HCM/finance applications, enterprise SaaS, integrations, and workflow platforms.
• Select appropriate delivery methods—agile, waterfall, or hybrid—based on project requirements.
• Establish application project governance including steering cadence, decision forums, change control, RAID standards, and clear acceptance criteria with business owners.
• Drive portfolio alignment for assigned projects by managing dependencies across applications, integrations, data, and shared platforms.
• Partner with Business stakeholders, Architecture, Security, and Data teams to ensure solution designs meet enterprise standards, including integration patterns, data controls, auditability, and non-functional requirements.
• Evaluate all deliveries from the perspective of Automation, AI, and Data analytics.

Vendor & Contract Management

• Lead vendor delivery across multiple stakeholders following project governance structure and application partner agreements.
• Monitor SOW deliverables, milestone payments, delivery quality, commercials tracking, and escalation management.
• Manage and maintain program and project plans, budgets, contracts, and procurement documentation.
• Prepare steering committee and management update decks.

Operational Delivery

• Lead discovery and requirements workshops, document functional and non-functional requirements, define scope, and establish baseline plans including schedule, resources, and budget.
• Manage system, program, and application delivery including design coordination, build and configuration oversight, integration coordination, environment readiness, and release planning.
• Plan and execute UAT approach, test cycles, defect triage, entry and exit criteria, and business sign-off management.
• Manage data migration planning, reconciliation approach, cutover runbooks, rollback planning, and go-live readiness checkpoints.
• Ensure service transition including training coordination, knowledge transfer, support model definition, SOP and runbook creation, and hypercare with clear ownership and SLAs.

Project Controls & Communication

• Maintain strong project controls through weekly status reporting, RAID logs, dependency tracking, and issue escalation.
• Provide transparent communication to sponsors and PMO.
• Prepare management updates and action tracking.

Team Leadership

• Lead a matrix team of transition managers, change managers, application analysts, developers, configurators, integration engineers, QA specialists, business SMEs, and vendors.
• Set clear outcomes and delivery discipline across the team.
• Build delivery accountability through clear RACI matrices, regular ceremonies (standups and weekly checkpoints), and performance follow-up on actions and decisions.

Process & Capability Improvement

• Standardize application delivery templates including BRD, FRD, user stories, UAT packs, cutover checklists, and handover checklists to improve consistency and reduce rework.
• Improve release predictability by strengthening change control, environment management, and dependency mapping across applications and integrations.
• Enhance operational stability by enforcing definition of done standards, including documentation, monitoring requirements, and service transition readiness.
• Drive program management, tracking, and reporting aligned with PMO processes.

Qualifications & Experience

Education

• Bachelor's degree in IT, Information Technology, or related field (minimum requirement).
• PMP (Project Management Professional) or PRINCE2 certification (minimum requirement).
• Agile certification such as CSM (Certified Scrum Master), PSM (Professional Scrum Master), or SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) (minimum requirement).
• Project Management Certification (preferred).

Experience

• Minimum of 10 years of experience delivering programs, application projects, and changes with ownership of scope, schedule, budget, and cross-functional coordination.
• Minimum of 15 years of experience in delivering enterprise application implementations (preferred).