Project Director

About the Role
The Project Director is the senior-most client-facing delivery leader, serving as the single point of accountability for the client account. This role is responsible for overall client delivery, contractual service outcomes, executive stakeholder confidence, full engagement P&L, account risk, and profitable growth. The Project Director represents the organization as the accountable executive for the complete engagement, integrating client relationship leadership, service delivery, contract performance, financial management, transformation, workforce readiness, risk, and account growth into a cohesive account agenda. This position entails ownership of the account business plan, protection of the contracted baseline, improvement of profitability, and conversion of qualified opportunities into sustainable revenue, while delegating day-to-day technical and operational management to the appropriate leaders.

Responsibilities
Client Delivery and Executive Account Leadership:

• Act as the senior accountable leader and primary executive interface for the client engagement.
• Build trusted relationships with client executive sponsors, technology leadership, service owners, and airport operational stakeholders.
• Translate contractual commitments and client priorities into an integrated account plan covering service outcomes, transformation, finance, risk, workforce, and growth.
• Lead executive steering committees, business reviews, and critical escalation forums, ensuring timely decisions and clear accountability.
• Maintain a single, accurate executive view of engagement health, priorities, risks, dependencies, and corrective actions.

Service Delivery and Operational Assurance:

• Own end-to-end contracted service outcomes across all in-scope technology towers, while delegating day-to-day delivery management to service and tower leaders.
• Ensure disciplined management of availability, resilience, major incidents, problems, change, capacity, continuity, security, compliance, assets, configuration, and service-level obligations.
• Act as the senior escalation authority for major disruptions, chronic performance issues, and material customer concerns.
• Demand evidence-based root-cause analysis, corrective action, and prevention of recurring incidents.
• Ensure airport operational criticality, controlled change, business continuity, and service recovery requirements are reflected in delivery decisions.

Mobilization and Transition Oversight:

• Provide executive sponsorship and governance for mobilization and transition, ensuring the designated Transition Manager's operational responsibilities are maintained.
• Assure readiness across resources, knowledge transfer, access, tooling, CMDB, documentation, operational processes, service acceptance, and customer communications.
• Review transition risks, dependencies, readiness evidence, and recovery actions; escalate material gaps before service acceptance.
• Ensure a controlled handover into steady-state operations with clear ownership, acceptance criteria, and unresolved-item governance.

Commercial, Contract, and Financial Leadership:

• Own engagement P&L, revenue assurance, gross margin, billing readiness, cost-to-serve, forecast accuracy, and financial risk.
• Ensure service commitments remain within approved scope, assumptions, dependencies, contract terms, and commercial baselines.
• Govern change requests, variations, out-of-scope demand, service credits, claims, and material commercial exposures with Finance, Legal, and Sales.
• Maintain an executive view of financial performance, cash and billing blockers, margin leakage, recovery actions, and material decisions.
• Balance service quality, resilience, and customer value with disciplined commercial management.

Customer Value, Transformation, and Continual Improvement:

• Maintain a governed improvement and transformation roadmap linked to resilience, productivity, user experience, operational efficiency, and client priorities.
• Ensure each initiative has an approved business case, measurable outcome, accountable owner, delivery plan, and dependency assessment.
• Use service data, trends, and recurring issues to prioritize automation, modernization, lifecycle actions, and technology refresh recommendations.
• Protect service stability, security, regulatory obligations, and live airport operations during transformation.

Account Growth and Business Development:

• Develop an account growth plan based on validated client needs, contract boundaries, delivery feasibility, and measurable customer value.
• Identify and qualify service extensions, projects, transformation initiatives, and technology-refresh opportunities with Sales, Presales, and Practice leadership.
• Lead executive positioning, opportunity shaping, proposal defense, and negotiation support for strategic opportunities.
• Ensure architecture, capacity, risk, contractual route, and commercial viability are validated before commitments are made.

Risk, Security, Compliance, and Assurance:

• Own the engagement-level risk and issue posture, with timely escalation of material operational, contractual, financial, security, regulatory, and reputational risks.
• Ensure compliance with client policies, airport security and access requirements, applicable Qatar obligations, governance, and relevant ISO/IEC 20000 and ISO/IEC 27001 controls.
• Ensure audit findings, control gaps, and non-conformities have accountable remediation plans and closure evidence.
• Protect confidentiality, data handling, segregation of duties, and conflict-of-interest controls across the engagement.

People and Organization Leadership:

• Build and lead a high-performing engagement organization with clear roles, delegated authority, and measurable accountability.
• Confirm workforce readiness, succession coverage, critical-skill availability, duty management, and contingency arrangements.
• Coach senior delivery leaders and establish a culture of ownership, transparency, customer focus, and cross-functional collaboration.
• Work with HR and Practice leadership on priority hiring, onboarding, retention, performance management, and capability development.

Qualifications
Mandatory Selection Criteria:

• Minimum 15 years of progressive IT experience, including at least 8 years in senior managed-services, outsourcing, programme, account, or technology-operations leadership.
• Demonstrated accountability for a large, complex, mission-critical 24x7 technology-services engagement with demanding availability, resilience, and continuity expectations.
• Proven experience as the senior client-facing and accountable delivery executive for a large, complex managed-services or technology-operations account, including executive governance, service commitments, major escalations, and client-confidence recovery.
• Demonstrated end-to-end accountability for integrated delivery across multiple technology towers, with authority to align operational, technical, commercial, and transformation teams around client outcomes.
• Strong commercial record covering P&L, financial forecasting, margin protection, revenue assurance, contract governance, and disciplined change control.
• Experience leading mobilization or transition into steady-state managed services, including readiness gates, knowledge transfer, service acceptance, and operational stabilization.
• Working knowledge of ITIL 4 service-management practices, major-incident governance, service continuity, capacity, problem management, and continual improvement.
• Ability to lead senior technical and service-delivery managers across infrastructure, cloud, network, workplace, monitoring, and operational support domains.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, Business, or a related discipline.
• Fluent professional English, written and spoken, with strong executive writing and presentation capability.

Strongly Preferred:

• Leadership experience in aviation, airport technology, transportation, critical national infrastructure, utilities, telecommunications, banking, or another high-availability 24x7 environment.
• Direct airport-operations experience is advantageous but not mandatory where the candidate has successfully led comparable mission-critical environments and can demonstrate strong operational-risk, resilience, and stakeholder leadership.
• Qatar or GCC enterprise/government experience and familiarity with customer-facing delivery in the region.
• Experience combining operational accountability with structured account development and value-led growth.
• PMP, PRINCE2 Practitioner or equivalent programme/project credential; ITIL 4 certification is strongly preferred.
• Working knowledge of ISO/IEC 20000, ISO/IEC 27001, COBIT, and formal programme governance.

Core Competencies:

• Executive presence, concise communication, and credible decision-making under pressure.
• Mission-critical service leadership, operational resilience, and major-incident command.
• Customer relationship management and influence across executive, operational, and technical stakeholders.
• Commercial judgment, financial acumen, and contract discipline.
• Programme mobilization, transition assurance, and operational-readiness governance.
• Risk-based prioritization, structured problem solving, and evidence-based performance management.
• Ability to connect service data, customer priorities, and business cases to practical transformation.
• Leadership across organizational and cultural boundaries, with strong talent-development capability.
• Account strategy, opportunity qualification, and value-based growth without compromising delivery.