Senior Consultant-Program Management

About the Role
We are seeking a seasoned professional with strong knowledge in enterprise data management, data architecture, data integration, data quality, data governance, business intelligence, and advanced analytics. The ideal candidate will have a profound understanding of artificial intelligence, machine learning, generative AI, DataOps, cloud, or hybrid data platforms, coupled with robust skills in program planning, governance, financial management, risk management, and stakeholder management. You will be able to manage both agile and traditional delivery approaches within a complex program while demonstrating excellent leadership, negotiation, decision-making, and conflict resolution capabilities. Strong commercial awareness, an ability to manage budgets, forecasts, contracts, and vendor performance, as well as excellent written and verbal communication skills, are essential. The ability to present complex information clearly to senior executives and governance committees, coupled with strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities, will contribute to your success. Fluency in English is required; Arabic language capability is an advantage.

Responsibilities
1. Program Leadership and Direction

• Provide overall leadership and accountability for the delivery of Data and Analytics Master Services Agreement.
• Translate client’s strategic objectives and approved initiatives into an integrated program roadmap, delivery plan, priorities, and measurable outcomes.
• Maintain a consolidated view of all projects, managed services, service requests, and planned initiatives.
• Act as the senior point of contact for program decisions, stakeholder coordination, and escalations.

2. MSA and Contract Management

• Ensure that all services are delivered in accordance with the MSA’s contractual, commercial, quality, and service-level requirements.
• Oversee the preparation, estimation, review, approval, and mobilization of service requests, work orders, and statements of work.
• Monitor contractual deliverables, milestones, acceptance criteria, financial consumption, invoicing, and remaining contract value.
• Manage scope changes and coordinate contractual matters with commercial, legal, finance, procurement, and contract-management teams.
• Proactively manage contractual obligations, assumptions, dependencies, and risks.

3. Program Governance and Reporting

• Establish and operate an effective governance framework across all initiatives and services delivered.
• Define governance forums, decision rights, reporting arrangements, responsibilities, and escalation paths.
• Lead steering committees, delivery reviews, operational reviews, and service-performance meetings.
• Provide client leadership with consolidated status reports, executive dashboards, decision papers, and clear visibility of performance, risks, priorities, and required actions.
• Maintain and monitor the program’s risks, issues, actions, dependencies, decisions, and changes.

4. Integrated Planning and Delivery Management

• Develop and maintain an integrated master plan covering projects, workstreams, releases, service requests, and operational activities.
• Coordinate dependencies across data platforms, statistical systems, applications, integrations, analytics solutions, government entities, and shared environments.
• Monitor delivery performance against approved scope, milestones, budgets, resource plans, and quality expectations.
• Identify schedule risks, bottlenecks, and resource constraints, and lead corrective or recovery actions where required.
• Ensure project and workstream managers maintain accurate and current delivery plans.

5. Demand and Service Request Management

• Establish a structured process for receiving, assessing, prioritizing, approving, and tracking new requirements under the MSA.
• Work with client stakeholders to clarify requirements and coordinate effort estimation, resource planning, solution assessment, commercial evaluation, and delivery scheduling.
• Maintain a consolidated backlog showing approved, pending, deferred, and completed requests.
• Ensure each approved request has a clearly defined scope, deliverables, responsibilities, assumptions, schedule, cost, and acceptance criteria.
• Monitor service requests through delivery, acceptance, closure, and transition to production support.

6. Stakeholder Management

• Build effective working relationships with client executives, business owners, technical teams, partners, and other stakeholders.
• Serve as the primary program-level escalation point between the client and relevant parties.
• Manage stakeholder expectations, facilitate timely decisions, and resolve conflicts between competing priorities.
• Ensure communication is clear, accurate, consistent, and appropriate for executive, business, and technical audiences.
• Promote collaboration, transparency, and shared accountability across participating teams.

7. Delivery Assurance and Quality Management

• Establish consistent delivery methodologies, standards, templates, controls, and quality gates across the program.
• Ensure projects follow the agreed lifecycle covering discovery, requirements, design, development, testing, deployment, transition, and closure.
• Oversee the quality and completeness of deliverables before submission to the client.
• Ensure traceability of requirements through design, implementation, testing, and acceptance.

8. Managed Services and Operational Performance

• Provide governance oversight for application support, platform operations, data operations, and managed services.
• Monitor compliance with agreed service levels, operational indicators, support obligations, and customer-service expectations.
• Review incidents, service requests, recurring problems, defects, capacity risks, and operational trends.
• Ensure critical incidents are effectively managed, communicated, escalated, and resolved, including root-cause analysis and permanent corrective action.
• Ensure completed projects and releases are successfully transitioned into production support.
• Promote continuous improvement in service availability, reliability, security, performance, automation, monitoring, and user satisfaction.

9. Financial and Commercial Management

• Prepare and maintain the program financial plan, budget, forecast, and consumption reports.
• Monitor resource costs, subcontractor costs, invoicing, revenue recognition, and overall financial performance.
• Track actual expenditure against approved budgets, work orders, and forecasts.
• Identify cost overruns, unplanned effort, and financial variances and initiate corrective actions.
• Ensure invoicing milestones are supported by accepted deliverables, approvals, and appropriate evidence.
• Optimize resource utilization and provide regular financial reporting to relevant governance bodies.

10. Resource and Partner Management

• Develop and maintain an integrated resource plan covering program management, architecture, data engineering, governance, analytics, platform engineering, application support, and specialist roles.
• Ensure qualified resources are assigned according to initiative requirements, priorities, and delivery schedules.
• Monitor capacity, utilization, performance, continuity, and succession requirements.
• Coordinate the mobilization and demobilization of project, managed-service, and staff-augmentation resources.
• Manage subcontractors, technology partners, and specialist providers, ensuring their deliverables and contractual commitments remain aligned with client requirements.
• Address resource gaps and capacity risks before they affect delivery.

11. Risk, Issue, and Dependency Management

• Establish a proactive framework for identifying, assessing, mitigating, and reporting program risks and issues.
• Monitor risks associated with stakeholder engagement, onboarding, integrations, infrastructure, security, quality, resources, and suppliers.
• Ensure mitigation and contingency actions are assigned, tracked, and regularly reviewed.
• Escalate material risks and issues through the appropriate governance channels.
• Ensure program decisions consider business, operational, technical, contractual, financial, security, and regulatory impacts.

12. Change Management and Adoption

• Coordinate stakeholder readiness, communication, training, knowledge transfer, and adoption activities across the program.
• Ensure new platforms, processes, reports, applications, and analytical capabilities are supported by appropriate business readiness and transition plans.
• Work with business owners to define adoption measures and expected outcomes.
• Monitor usage, stakeholder feedback, adoption challenges, and capability development needs.
• Ensure new processes and operating models are documented, communicated, and transferred to client teams to support sustainable operations.

13. Benefits and Value Realization

• Establish a program-level framework for defining, measuring, and reporting expected outcomes and realized benefits.
• Monitor improvements in data quality, platform reliability, statistical production, and data sharing.
• Identify opportunities to increase the value generated from client’s data and technology investments.
• Report achievements, service improvements, and realized benefits to relevant governance bodies.
• Maintain alignment between program expenditure, strategic priorities, and delivered business value.

Accountabilities
The Program Manager will be accountable for coordinating and maintaining the following program-level deliverables:

• Program charter and governance framework.
• Integrated program roadmap and master delivery plan.
• Annual and quarterly delivery plans.
• Consolidated service-request and demand backlog.
• Program organization structure and resource plan.
• Stakeholder engagement and communication plan.
• Program status reports and executive dashboards.
• Financial plan, forecast, and consumption reports.
• Risk, issue, dependency, decision, action, and change registers.
• Service level and managed services performance reports.
• Program quality and delivery assurance framework.
• Benefits realization and value tracking reports.
• Steering committee presentations and decision papers.
• Program closure, lessons-learned, and transition reports.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in information technology, computer science, engineering, data management, business administration, or a related discipline.
• Project or program management certification such as PMP, PgMP, PRINCE2 Practitioner.
• Agile certification such as PMI-ACP, SAFe, Scrum Master.
• IT service-management certification, such as ITIL, is desirable.
• Data management or governance certification, such as DAMA CDMP, is an advantage.
• At least 15 years of professional experience in data, analytics, digital transformation, or systems delivery.
• At least 8 years of experience managing complex, multi-workstream programs.
• Proven experience managing large-scale master services agreements, framework agreements, managed services, or multi-year transformation programs.
• Demonstrated experience delivering enterprise data platforms, data warehouses, data governance, artificial intelligence, advanced analytics, or statistical systems.
• Strong experience in program governance, commercial and contract management, executive reporting.
• Experience overseeing both project delivery and production managed services within the same program.
• Experience managing multidisciplinary teams, subcontractors, technology vendors, and specialist resources.
• Previous experience in Qatar or the GCC public sector is strongly preferred.