Head of PMO

Do you want to love what you do at work? Do you want to make a difference, an impact, transform peoples lives? Do you want to work with a team that believes in disrupting the normal, boring, and average?

If yes, then this is the job you're looking for ,webook.com is Saudi's #1 event ticketing and experience booking platforms in terms of technology, features, agility, revenue serving some of the largest mega events in the Kingdom surpassing over 2 billion sales.

Job Overview:

The Head of PMO directly leads the Project Manager team within the Business Solutions Department and is accountable for portfolio governance, delivery compliance, and PMO framework maturity across all concurrent projects. The Head of PMO sets the delivery standard, coaches the PM team to that standard, and governs how every project is initiated, run, escalated, and closed. As the line manager for the PM team, this role combines people leadership with structural PMO ownership, building the Center of Excellence, driving standardised controls, and producing the executive-ready reporting that gives the Director and CCO full portfolio visibility. A core outcome is ensuring projects consistently meet or outperform pre-estimated budgets through baseline discipline, change control enforcement, and early financial intervention.

Key Responsibilities:

1) PM Team Leadership & Performance Management

• Directly manage the BSD Project Manager team: set performance expectations, conduct regular 1:1s, deliver performance reviews, and support professional development.
• Assign and balance project workload across the PM team based on complexity, capacity, and growth objectives, ensuring no PM is over-extended and every project has appropriate coverage.
• Coach PMs on methodology, stakeholder management, scope control, and delivery discipline, raising the standard of craft, not just compliance.
• Onboard new Project Managers into the BSD delivery model: governance expectations, tooling, reporting cadence, and stakeholder engagement standards.
• Act as the first escalation point for PM-level issues: unblock delivery problems, mediate stakeholder conflicts, and provide senior judgment on complex scope or schedule decisions.

2) PMO Governance & Delivery Assurance

• Own and enforce the end-to-end PMO governance model: stage gates (G0–G5), minimum project artifacts, Director approval workflows, and escalation paths.
• Run delivery assurance reviews (health checks, compliance audits, and quality checkpoints) and drive corrective actions where projects deviate from standards.
• Ensure consistent application of governance across all project archetypes (white-label, grey-label, integration, hybrid) while keeping controls pragmatic and execution-friendly.
• Chair the Change Control Board: intake, impact assessment, approval or rejection, re-baselining, and communication to all affected stakeholders.

3) PMO Framework Ownership & Continuous Improvement

• Maintain and continuously optimise the BSD PMO framework: project lifecycle, standards, templates, toolkits, and playbooks, serving as the single source of truth for how delivery is run.
• Identify and eliminate systemic delivery breakdowns: scope creep patterns, late feasibility discovery, rework loops, and weak sign-off cultures.
• Operate with a Center of Excellence mindset: codify lessons learned and best practices, and continuously raise PM methodology maturity across the team.
• Maintain PM onboarding documentation and standards, reducing time-to-productivity for new Project Managers and eliminating methodology drift.

4) Portfolio Reporting & Executive Visibility

• Own the portfolio reporting cadence and outputs: weekly portfolio health review, monthly performance packs, and steering committee materials for the Director and CCO.
• Provide data-backed insights: schedule variance, budget variance, scope volatility, RAID trends, and cross-project dependency visibility.
• Establish and protect a "single source of truth" for portfolio status, with strong data quality and governance traceability across Smartsheet and reporting outputs.
• Design and maintain the portfolio dashboard: real-time RAG status, milestone tracking, resource utilisation, and financial performance across all concurrent projects.

5) Budget Performance, Baselines & Financial Controls

• Ensure every project has an approved, documented baseline covering scope, schedule, and budget before execution begins. No project starts without a signed baseline.
• Monitor cost performance and forecast-to-complete across the portfolio; initiate recovery actions and escalate to the Director when variances exceed defined thresholds.
• Enforce change control discipline so that every scope change is formally assessed for time and cost impact, and approved before implementation begins.
• Improve estimation hygiene and governance controls to enable projects to consistently meet or outperform pre-estimated budgets through reduced rework, tighter CR governance, and better resource utilisation.
• Partner with the Projects Financial Controller (when in post) on invoicing trigger governance, per-project P&L tracking, and commercial change order processes.

6) RAID, Dependencies & Cross-Project Risk

• Standardise RAID governance across the portfolio: every risk, assumption, issue, and dependency has an owner, a mitigation action, and a measurable closure criterion.
• Surface and manage cross-project dependencies proactively, driving early escalation and resolution before they become delivery blockers.
• Maintain the portfolio-level risk register and escalate strategic risks to the Director before they become crises.
• Run the post-implementation review (PIR) process on every project closeout, and embed lessons learned back into the methodology and template library.

Requirements

Education & Certifications

• Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Engineering, Information Technology, or equivalent (required)
• PMP, PRINCE2 Practitioner, MSP, or MoP certification, one or more strongly preferred
• Agile certifications such as CSM, PSM, or SAFe are an advantage in hybrid delivery contexts

Experience Requirements

• 7+ years in PMO leadership, portfolio governance, delivery assurance, or project controls, with a minimum of 3 years in a role with direct line management of Project Managers or delivery professionals
• Proven track record building or significantly improving a PMO framework from near-scratch, with the ability to articulate what changed, why it changed, and what the measurable outcome was
• Demonstrated experience governing a portfolio of 8 or more concurrent complex implementations in technology, B2B, or professional services environments
• Strong background in portfolio analytics and performance reporting, including KPIs, health frameworks, trend analysis, schedule and budget variance, and RAID analytics
• Experience managing cross-functional stakeholders including Product, Engineering, and commercial teams within a RACI-governed delivery model
• Preferred: prior experience in a Centre of Excellence, PMO transformation, methodology office, or operational excellence function