PMO Lead

Role Overview

WeBook is Saudi Arabia’s leading event ticketing and experience booking platform, known for its technology, feature set, speed, and scale. The business supports major events across the Kingdom and has processed more than 2 billion in sales.

This position leads the Project Manager team within the Business Solutions Department and carries end-to-end accountability for portfolio governance, delivery compliance, and the maturity of the PMO operating model across multiple active projects. The role blends people management with PMO ownership: setting delivery expectations, strengthening standards, building a center of excellence, and producing reporting that gives senior leadership clear visibility across the portfolio. A major focus is ensuring projects stay within approved budgets through disciplined baselines, strict change control, and early financial intervention.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and manage the BSD Project Manager team, including goal setting, regular one-to-ones, performance reviews, and development support.
• Allocate work across project managers based on complexity, capacity, and development needs so that coverage remains balanced and sustainable.
• Coach project managers on delivery methods, stakeholder handling, scope management, and execution discipline.
• Bring new project managers into the BSD delivery approach, including governance rules, tools, reporting routines, and stakeholder engagement expectations.
• Serve as the first escalation point for PM-level challenges, helping resolve delivery blockers, stakeholder disagreements, and difficult scope or timeline decisions.
• Own and enforce the full PMO governance model, including stage gates G0 to G5, required project artefacts, Director approvals, and escalation routes.
• Conduct delivery assurance activities such as health checks, compliance audits, and quality reviews, and ensure corrective actions are completed when projects drift from standards.
• Apply governance consistently across white-label, grey-label, integration, and hybrid project types while keeping the process practical and execution-friendly.
• Chair the Change Control Board, covering request intake, impact analysis, approval or rejection, re-baselining, and stakeholder communication.
• Maintain and improve the BSD PMO framework, including lifecycle standards, templates, toolkits, and playbooks that define how delivery is run.
• Identify recurring delivery issues such as scope creep, late feasibility discovery, rework cycles, and weak sign-off behaviour, then remove them through process improvements.
• Promote a centre-of-excellence mindset by capturing lessons learned, sharing best practices, and steadily improving PM maturity across the team.
• Keep PM onboarding documentation and standards current so new managers become productive faster and methodology drift is reduced.
• Own the portfolio reporting rhythm, including weekly health reviews, monthly performance packs, and steering committee materials for the Director and CCO.
• Provide evidence-based insights covering schedule variance, budget variance, scope changes, RAID trends, and cross-project dependencies.
• Maintain a single trusted source of portfolio status data with strong traceability and data quality across Smartsheet and reporting outputs.
• Design and manage the portfolio dashboard with live RAG status, milestone progress, resource utilisation, and financial performance across all active projects.
• Ensure each project has an approved baseline for scope, schedule, and budget before work begins; no project should start without a signed baseline.
• Monitor cost performance and forecast-to-complete across the portfolio, escalating and driving recovery actions when thresholds are exceeded.
• Enforce formal change control so any scope change is assessed for time and cost impact and approved before implementation.
• Improve estimation quality and governance to help projects meet or outperform planned budgets through less rework, tighter CR governance, and better resource use.
• Work with the Projects Financial Controller, where applicable, on invoicing triggers, project P&L tracking, and commercial change-order processes.
• Standardise RAID governance so every risk, assumption, issue, and dependency has an owner, mitigation, and measurable closure criteria.
• Track and resolve cross-project dependencies proactively before they turn into delivery blockers.
• Maintain the portfolio risk register and escalate strategic risks to the Director early, before they become critical issues.
• Run post-implementation reviews for each project closeout and feed lessons learned back into the methodology and template library.

Requirements

• A bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Engineering, Information Technology, or an equivalent field is required.
• Professional credentials such as PMP, PRINCE2 Practitioner, MSP, or MoP are strongly preferred.
• Agile certifications like CSM, PSM, or SAFe are beneficial for hybrid delivery settings.
• At least 7 years of experience in PMO leadership, portfolio governance, delivery assurance, or project controls.
• Minimum 3 years of direct line management experience leading project managers or other delivery professionals.
• Demonstrated success creating or substantially improving a PMO framework from an early-stage or near-zero setup.
• Experience overseeing a portfolio of 8 or more complex concurrent implementations in technology, B2B, or professional services.
• Strong capability in portfolio analytics and performance reporting, including KPI tracking, health frameworks, trend analysis, and schedule/budget variance review.
• Experience working with cross-functional stakeholders such as Product, Engineering, and commercial teams within a RACI-based delivery structure.
• Prior exposure to a Centre of Excellence, PMO transformation, methodology office, or operational excellence environment is preferred.

Additional Information

This role is based onsite in Riyadh, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and is intended for a full-time employment arrangement. The posting does not specify salary, vacancy count, start date, or application deadline.

No internship duration applies to this role.