Unit Head - Program & Project Management Governance

Role purpose

Governance and assurance

• Establishes and improves governance frameworks, policies, standards, templates, decision rights, and lifecycle stage gates.
• Provides governance guidance to sponsors, program managers, project managers, and delivery teams.
• Conducts independent health checks, quality reviews, and assurance assessments based on delivery risk and materiality.
• Monitors scope, schedule, cost, benefits, risks, issues, dependencies, changes, decisions, and remediation actions.
• Maintains audit readiness and supports internal, external, and regulatory reviews.

Reporting, forums, and portfolio value

• Owns portfolio dashboards, status standards, data quality controls, and reporting calendars.
• Provides management information and monitors delivery KPIs, portfolio health, investment performance, and benefits realization.
• Coordinates governance forums, agendas, decision papers, minutes, and action tracking with business and control stakeholders.
• Supports strategic prioritization and alignment; tracks business cases, benefits, and strategic interdependencies.

People and continuous improvement

• Develops workforce and FTE plans aligned with portfolio demand, organizational structure, and budget.
• Monitors vacancies, workload, utilization, capability gaps, and succession risks.
• Leads staff development, mentoring, coaching, learning pathways, and succession readiness.
• Leads the team, sets objectives and service standards, and drives PMO maturity using lessons learned and assurance findings.

Knowledge management

• Maintains a single source of truth for portfolio status, risks, issues, dependencies, decisions, benefits, and governance evidence.
• Owns the central repository for PMO standards, templates, project history, lessons learned, and approved governance artifacts.

Specialist knowledge and capabilities

• Requires knowledge of PMO governance, portfolio and investment controls, project assurance, stage gates, executive reporting, and data quality.
• Requires knowledge of risk, issue, dependency, change, decision, audit, regulatory compliance, and remediation tracking.
• Requires Agile, Waterfall, and hybrid delivery governance knowledge, plus workforce planning and capacity management.
• Requires stakeholder management, facilitation, executive communication, leadership, coaching, and continuous improvement capability.
• Role includes development planning for UAE Nationals and other staff within the function.

Performance indicators