Key Responsibilities
1. Project Profitability and Financial Management
- Take ownership of financial performance across the fixed-price delivery portfolio.
- Establish project-level budgeting, effort tracking, cost forecasting, and profitability reporting.
- Monitor actual costs against approved budgets and estimated costs to complete.
- Identify potential overruns early and implement corrective actions.
- Improve delivery margins through better planning, productivity, resource utilisation, and execution discipline.
- Work with Finance to establish accurate, consistent project margin reporting.
2. Project Planning and Execution
- Ensure projects begin with clear requirements, deliverables, acceptance criteria, milestones, and resource plans.
- Validate delivery plans and identify unrealistic schedules, dependencies, and technical risks.
- Establish standardised project governance and weekly delivery reviews.
- Improve schedule predictability, milestone completion, and resource allocation.
- Personally intervene in critical or under performing projects and lead recovery efforts.
3. Scope and Change Management
- Establish disciplined requirements management and scope control.
- Ensure all changes are documented and assessed for their impact on effort, cost, and timelines.
- Work with Sales and Account Management to obtain commercial approval for additional scope.
- Prevent unapproved work from creating unnecessary delivery costs.
- Ensure project teams understand and adhere to contractual scope and acceptance criteria.
4. Engineering Quality and Delivery Efficiency
- Work closely with technical leads to review architecture, engineering estimates, and implementation approaches.
- Identify technical decisions that may create rework, complexity, or delivery delays.
- Improve development practices, code review discipline, testing, and quality assurance.
- Reduce avoidable defects, repeated rework, and inefficient engineering practices.
- Encourage practical adoption of AI-assisted development and automation where they demonstrably improve productivity and quality.
5. People Leadership and Accountability
- Lead project managers, technical leads, and delivery teams.
- Establish clear ownership, performance expectations, and accountability across projects.
- Review the capabilities of existing delivery leaders and identify coaching, training, or organisational changes required.
- Build a strong culture of ownership, transparency, and problem-solving.
- Make resource allocation and performance management decisions to improve delivery outcomes.
6. Client Communication and Satisfaction
- Ensure proactive communication on project progress, risks, and changes.
- Intervene in escalations and manage difficult delivery situations constructively.
- Improve client confidence through transparent reporting and predictable execution.
- Protect delivery quality and client relationships while improving project profitability.
Required Experience and Qualifications
- Significant experience in software engineering and technical project delivery, preferably 12+ years.
- At least 5 years in a leadership role managing multiple software delivery projects.
- Demonstrated experience managing fixed-price software development projects with direct financial accountability.
- Strong understanding of project budgeting, gross margins, resource costs, cost-to-complete forecasting, and scope management.
- Experience leading project managers and technical leads across multiple engagements.
- Sound technical understanding of custom web applications, SaaS platforms, APIs, databases, mobile applications, and modern software architectures.
- Familiarity with AI, GenAI, automation, or data engineering project delivery.
- Experience working directly with international clients.
- Strong analytical, leadership, communication, and decision-making skills.
Highly Preferred
- Experience in an outsourced software product development, digital engineering, or IT services company.
- Proven record of improving fixed-price project margins or recovering troubled projects.
- Experience establishing delivery governance and financial controls where processes were previously immature.
- Ability to challenge engineering assumptions without unnecessarily micromanaging technical teams.
- Experience managing distributed engineering teams and working across multiple technology stacks.