Information Technology Project Manager

Role Overview

We invite applications for an experienced Information Technology Project Manager to oversee the complete delivery lifecycle of technology and digital initiatives in Dubai, UAE. This position requires serving as a liaison between business stakeholders and development teams, facilitating Agile processes, and ensuring projects are delivered on time, within budget, scope, and quality standards. A strong understanding of trading and capital markets is vital.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead full project lifecycle management, including initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, control, and closure for multiple tech projects.
• Define project charters encompassing scope, goals, deliverables, success parameters, assumptions, constraints, and governance frameworks.
• Create and update integrated project schedules, roadmaps, milestones, dependency tracking, and critical path assessments.
• Oversee budgeting activities: estimates, forecasts, tracking actuals, variance analysis, purchase orders, and invoice approvals.
• Manage resourcing across internal teams, contractors, and external vendors.
• Implement stringent change control procedures assessing scope adjustments for impacts on cost, schedule, quality, and risks, securing necessary approvals.
• Ensure adherence to PMO standards, software development lifecycle (SDLC) governance, information security policies, audit requirements, and regulations.
• Maintain comprehensive, auditable project documentation and artifacts.
• Maintain and actively update risk, assumptions, issues, and dependencies (RAID) logs with mitigation and contingency plans, assigning ownership.
• Resolve issues promptly or escalate if beyond project authority; manage cross-team dependencies, including infrastructure, security, data, operations, and external parties.
• Serve as primary liaison for business stakeholders during project timelines, collaborating with analysts and product owners to clarify, prioritize, and validate requirements.
• Facilitate steering committee and project board meetings, preparing decision documents and options analyses.
• Deliver regular, transparent, and accurate status reports including progress, budget, risks, and anticipated completion.
• Develop and maintain executive dashboards and customized reports tailored to different leadership levels.
• Negotiate scope, schedule, cost, and quality trade-offs with credibility and openness.
• Manage vendor relationships including statement of work, deliverable acceptance, service levels, performance review, and commercial escalations.
• Lead Agile ceremonies such as sprint planning, daily stand-ups, backlog grooming, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.
• Work closely with product owners to ensure backlog items are well-defined, prioritized, and ready for development sprints.
• Track and analyze delivery metrics including velocity, burndown, cycle time, throughput, defect trends, and release predictability.
• Identify and eliminate blockers for the delivery team, safeguarding against unmanaged scope changes.
• Coach teams and business units on Agile adoption and support hybrid Agile/waterfall methods where necessary.
• Promote continuous improvement by driving action on retrospective findings and lessons learned.
• Coordinate comprehensive testing plans encompassing system, integration, performance, security, and user acceptance testing (UAT).
• Manage UAT activities with stakeholders, including defect triage, prioritization, and approval.
• Plan and execute release activities, including cutover, rollback strategies, go/no-go decisions, and production readiness assessments.
• Ensure organizational readiness by driving training, communications, process updates, and change management impacts.
• Facilitate smooth transition to operational support via documentation, handover, and hypercare phases.
• Conduct post-implementation reviews capturing lessons and evaluating benefit realization against business cases.

Required Qualifications and Experience

• At least 8 years’ experience managing IT, software, and digital projects end-to-end.
• A minimum of 3 years managing projects within Agile methodologies.
• Proven success in concurrently delivering multiple projects on schedule, budget, and quality.
• Expertise across Agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe) and traditional or hybrid project delivery approaches (waterfall, stage-gate).
• Strong facilitation skills for Agile ceremonies and team coaching.
• Advanced planning and scheduling capabilities including work breakdown structure creation, estimation, dependency tracking, and critical path analysis.
• Experience in budget control, resource planning, vendor and contract management.
• Disciplined approach to risk, issue, dependency, and change management.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills for executive audiences.
• Capable stakeholder management, negotiation, influence, and conflict resolution at all organizational levels.
• Technical proficiency to engage effectively with engineering teams, including understanding of SDLC, APIs, cloud, web/mobile applications, data/reporting, testing, environment, and release management.
• Business analysis skills with process flows, writing user stories, acceptance criteria, and traceability.
• Experienced with project and collaboration tools such as Jira, Azure DevOps, Confluence, Microsoft Project, Smartsheet, SharePoint, Power BI, or alternatives.
• Advanced skills in Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint for complex analysis and reporting.
• Essential understanding of trading and capital markets, including trade lifecycle, market data, brokerage, exchange operations, post-trade processes, and regulatory environment.
• Fluent written and spoken English communication.

Preferred Qualifications

• Professional certifications like PMP, PRINCE2, PMI-ACP, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Professional Scrum Master (PSM), or SAFe.
• Arabic language skills, spoken and written (preferred).
• Experience working with exchanges, brokerages, banks, asset managers, or fintech firms.
• Background managing regulatory, compliance, or audited technology projects.
• Experience leading systems integrators and distributed/offshore teams.
• Formal change management training (e.g., Prosci, ADKAR).
• Experience with ITIL service transition or programme/portfolio management.
• Contributions to establishing or enhancing PMO procedures, templates, and governance standards.

Educational Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business Administration, or a related field is mandatory.