Senior Manager, Institutional Project Management

Role Overview

This senior leadership position is responsible for designing, implementing, and overseeing the organisation’s project management office (PMO) function, ensuring that all initiatives across landscapes, programmes, and departments follow consistent governance, lifecycle, and delivery standards. Day to day, the role involves monitoring portfolio performance, conducting stage-gate reviews, advising project teams on best practices, and reporting risks and progress to executive leadership. By embedding structured methodologies like PMBOK and PRINCE2 within a conservation context, this role directly strengthens the organisation’s ability to deliver complex, donor-funded projects on time and within scope.

Key Responsibilities

• Establish and maintain a centralised project portfolio management system that tracks status, budgets, timelines, dependencies, and risks across all multi-country initiatives.
• Lead stage-gate quality assurance reviews for strategic and high-risk projects, ensuring proper documentation and adherence to governance checkpoints.
• Develop and update standard templates, processes, and tools for project initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and close-out.
• Support leadership in prioritising and allocating resources by assessing strategic alignment, organisational capacity, and risk exposure.
• Facilitate regular risk and issue reviews, ensuring mitigation actions are documented, escalated when necessary, and followed up to resolution.
• Coordinate cross-functional communication and stakeholder engagement for major transformation initiatives and donor-funded programmes.
• Build organisational project management capability through training, mentoring, communities of practice, and competency frameworks.
• Provide clear, concise portfolio-level reporting for the Board and senior management, highlighting delivery trends, bottlenecks, and corrective actions.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Project Management, Business Administration, International Development, or a closely related field.
• Professional certification such as PMP (Project Management Professional) or PRINCE2 Practitioner.
• At least 8 to 10 years of progressive experience in project, programme, or portfolio management, with a minimum of 4 years in a senior PMO, governance, or institutional project leadership role.
• Demonstrated track record managing complex, multi-country programmes funded by international donors.
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing project governance frameworks, lifecycle methodologies, risk management processes, and delivery assurance practices.
• Strong systems thinking ability and capacity to work independently with minimal supervision.
• Fluent in English; professional proficiency in French is highly desirable.
• Excellent interpersonal and collaboration skills, comfortable working across culturally diverse teams and time zones.

What We Offer / Why Join

This is a newly created position, giving the successful candidate the unique opportunity to shape the organisation’s PMO from the ground up, influence project delivery culture, and drive consistency across high-impact conservation work. You will work alongside dedicated professionals in a mission-driven environment, leading initiatives that directly contribute to wildlife conservation and community development across Africa.