Senior Portfolio Manager

About The Role

The Senior Portfolio Manager plays a crucial role in ensuring the successful delivery of technology initiatives that contribute to business value, encompassing objectives like revenue growth, cost optimization, and enhanced customer experience. Key performance indicators for this role include adherence to timelines, budgetary considerations, and the quality of delivery.

Designation: Senior Portfolio Manager

Status: Management

Location: UAE

About The Role

The Senior Portfolio Manager plays a crucial role in ensuring the successful delivery of technology initiatives that contribute to business value, encompassing objectives like revenue growth, cost optimization, and enhanced customer experience. Key performance indicators for this role include adherence to timelines, budgetary considerations, and the quality of delivery.

Ideal candidates should possess aviation experience, and Pakistani nationals are particularly encouraged to apply, with the company facilitating visa and related arrangements.

Roles & Responsibilities

Strategy & Planning

• Product Strategy Leadership: Lead in shaping the product strategy with business stakeholders.
• Funds Allocation: Facilitate the allocation of funds to value stream initiatives based on priority.
• Benefits Realization: Own benefits realization for all value stream initiatives, optimizing value flow.
• Lean Business Cases: Define Lean business cases for agile initiatives and traditional cases for waterfall projects.
• Dependency Accountability: Overall accountability for managing dependencies within and between value streams.
• Synchronization Meetings: Chair periodic synchronization meetings at the value stream level.

Management and Operations

• Define career paths and oversee learning plans for team members.
• Lead and motivate high-performing cross-functional teams, championing agile and modern waterfall techniques.
• Create an environment fostering open communication, shared vision, retrospection, and recognition.
• Own the resourcing of projects and scrum teams, ensuring appropriate sizing and driving recruitment decisions.
• Proactively identify cross-value stream risks, issues, and dependencies, ensuring swift resolution.
• Own the relationship with senior business stakeholders, addressing impediments, managing risk, and driving continuous improvement.
• Delivery Model Decision: Decide on the appropriate delivery model (agile or waterfall) for each initiative.
• Agile Release Train (ART) Setup: Work with the Lean Agile Centre of Excellence to establish Agile Release Trains.
• Support for Release Train Engineer: Support the Release Train Engineer in establishing annual calendars for Iterations and Program Increments (PIs).
• Alignment with Governance: Work with PMO, Release Train Engineers, and Program Managers to ensure alignment with governance, best practices, standards, and processes.
• Culture and Process Drive: Drive a culture of lean‑agile working and a ‘get it done’ mentality, seeking process simplification and automation where possible.

Qualification and Requirement

• Minimum 7 years of Program/Portfolio Management experience in complex project delivery.
• Mandatory 3+ years of experience in the airline or related industry.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business Administration, or equivalent; a Master’s degree is highly advantageous.
• Strong knowledge of project, program, and portfolio management practices, encompassing both agile and waterfall methodologies, with a solid understanding of product management principles.
• Beneficial 3+ years of experience in Agile at scale, involving portfolio, value stream, or program levels. Experience in executing PI planning events and coordinating Agile Release Trains (ART) is a plus.
• Advanced understanding of aviation sector processes and technologies, including plan-to-product and acquire-to-pay areas such as PSS, Revenue Management, Global Distribution Services, and Loyalty.
• Advanced knowledge of airline regulations, EU compliance, with a strong emphasis on GDPR and Data Privacy.
• Possession of project management certifications in both waterfall (Prince 2, PMP, or equivalent) and Agile (Scrum, SAFe, or equivalent).
• Experience in aligning business and IT, promoting common approaches, and delivering sustainable, reusable solutions using agile and waterfall methodologies. Proven ability to drive change and challenge the status quo is advantageous.
• Passion for creating new products and delivering technology initiatives that generate significant value for customers and the organization.
• Proven leadership skills with outstanding interpersonal, communication, and relationship-building abilities across all organizational levels. Executive-level engagement experience with both business and IT executives for value delivery.