Head - PMO

John Keells Holdings PLC (JKH) is Sri Lanka’s largest listed conglomerate in the Colombo Stock Exchange. From managing hotels and resorts in Sri Lanka and the Maldives to providing port, marine fuel and logistics services to IT solutions, manufacturing of food and beverages to running a chain of supermarkets, tea broking to stock broking, life insurance and banking to real estate, we have made our presence felt in virtually every major sphere of the economy.

Our business built over 150 years touches nearly every major sector of the economy. We generate a significant quantum of data, and we intend to use it to build the future of our businesses. Our Digital and Analytics insights can positively disrupt life for all Sri Lankans and our commitment to passion and excellence will help to deliver superior value to customers, our people, and the community.

OCTAVE is the cornerstone of our data-driven strategic and operational decisions!

Team OCTAVE solves JKH’s most intractable problems across industry verticals by building pipelines using Python and Azure data factory to work on one of the country’s richest data lakes, building and implementing complex machine learning algorithms that will impact millions of Sri Lankans.

Role Description

The Head – Project Management Office role will be reporting to the Head of OCTAVE. The role holder will be responsible for steering the PMO office to contribute to OCTAVE’s growth to maintain its position as an Advance Analytics Center of Excellence in the region. The ideal candidate must have at least 5-8 years of program management office (PMO) operations experience with an ability to think tactically as well as strategically while leading cross functional teams in a matrixed environment. The primary goal of this candidate is to achieve benefits from standardizing and following project management policies, processes, and methods to be leveraged by multiple project/product owners. The candidate should have the ability to provide a decision support information for stakeholders (including executives) to make appropriate decisions.

Key Responsibilities

• PMO is responsible for putting necessary processes and management frameworks in place and monitoring them against the KPIs set forth and agreed upon.
• Ability to take a strategic lens on the overall program and support new business build.
• Proactively solving potential risk issues in the future, pre-empting disruptions to the value delivery through internal and external factors.
• Should act as the gatekeeper for technical fit signoffs and rollouts. PMO is to monitor and escalate adherence if any key KPIs and thresholds are not met per the COE (Center of Excellence) Markers.
• Ensuring that communication with different stakeholders (including senior management) & decisions are taken by the right people, based on the correct information presented. Conduct regular audits of use cases to ensure adherence to set processes and document them against the CMMI process.
• Monitor project expenditures and provide detailed reports. Providing information with a single source of the truth. Information should be relevant and accurate to support effective decision-making by stakeholders (including senior management).
• Provide process excellence consultancy to the delivery teams.
• Work closely with external clients in terms of project management process for smoother deliverables
• Making it easy for project teams to do their jobs by providing training, mentoring and quality assurance.
• Providing the function for managing documentation, project history and organizational knowledge.

Skills and Competencies:

• Gathering data about project progress and producing reports.
• Developing standards and processes.
• Encouraging (or enforcing where necessary) the use of those standards and processes.
• Managing resources for projects and tracking benefits.
• Delivering training and mentoring project team members.
• Managing dependencies across multiple projects.
• Reporting on financial information such as return on investment.
• Superior verbal, written and interpersonal communication skills with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Identify and analyze opportunities and make tactical/strategic recommendations.
• Hands-on project management approach that includes a proven track record of project/program execution.
• Experience in working with agile lifecycle and/or tracking and process management tools (e.g., JIRA) preferred.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in business, IT or Project management or a related field.
• 8+ years of project management experience.
• CMMI Certified professional or Experience in working in a CMMI Level 3 certified environment.
• Analytics/Data Science experience preferred.
• Hands-on experience with managing clients and teams.
• Proven success in a corporate setting, working with all levels of management.
• Strong written, verbal, and presentation skills.

John Keells Group is an equal-opportunity employer, and we invite applications from all suitably qualified individuals to join our team. By applying, you consent to the processing of your personal information for recruitment purposes and acknowledge that reference checks may be conducted.

Want to learn more about Octave? Check out https://www.keells.com/octave/