The African Leadership University (ALU) is at the beginning of a rapid growth spurt, expanding its student numbers, course offerings, and campus locations. Over the next 5–7 years, ALU expects its student numbers to grow from the current 360 (on one campus) to over 25,000 (distributed on perhaps 6–8 campuses and in the 'cloud').
Role Overview
The Senior Project Manager & PMO Lead is responsible for shaping and driving ALU’s execution culture by building a strong Project Management Office (PMO) and delivering high-impact strategic and digital initiatives. This role is deeply hands-on: the PM will lead major institution-wide projects while simultaneously establishing the systems, standards, and operating rhythms that ensure project discipline across the university.
The ideal candidate combines strategic oversight with operational precision, thrives in execution-heavy environments, and has a proven ability to manage complex cross-functional teams. They will collaborate closely with the Enterprise Transformation team, ExCo, and departments across the Business Office (Risk & Performance, Finance, People, Legal) as well as academic leaders including Deans and their Heads of Department to strengthen project ownership, promote accountability, and embed ALU’s unified project delivery framework across the institution.
Role Responsibilities
1. Build and strengthen the Project Management Office (PMO)
- Establish strong foundations for a high-performance PMO, including standardizing governance models, communication rhythms, and escalation pathways.
- Benchmark, refine, and implement a unified Project Management Framework tailored to ALU’s needs.
- Digitize and streamline PMO processes, documentation, and communication flows to ensure transparency, consistency, and institutional memory.
- Develop OKRs and performance metrics for the PMO collaboratively within the first 90 days.
2. Drive hands-on project delivery
- Lead complex, strategic, operational, and digital projects from discovery to close-out.
- Develop high-quality project artefacts including project charters, detailed plans, RAID logs, governance structures, and cost tracking mechanisms.
- Facilitate structured working sessions and enforce disciplined execution, scope management, and rigorous change control.
- Maintain precision in delivery, ensuring projects remain on track against scope, timelines, and approved budgets.
- Expected outcome: consistently updated, accurate project dashboards; disciplined reporting cycles; strong hygiene across all PMO-led and departmental projects.
3. Portfolio leadership and institutional visibility
- Lead strategic conversations with senior leadership to translate institutional priorities into a clear and actionable project portfolio.
- Partner with business units to identify needs, shape project proposals, and develop period-based roadmaps that reflect strategic intent, capacity, and resourcing realities.
- Drive disciplined portfolio management by constructively challenging RAG statuses, uncovering root-cause blockers, and ensuring teams move beyond reporting to actively improving project health and delivery outcomes.
- Deploy and oversee an integrated Project Portfolio Management (PPM) dashboard offering clear visibility into project health, dependencies, risks, and impact across all strategic and enabling initiatives.
- Ensure all active projects—both PMO-led and those led by departmental PMs—are updated monthly with complete and accurate data to enable confident ExCo decision-making.
- Support planning and prioritization cycles by providing reliable information on resource allocation, risk exposure, and delivery feasibility.
- Expected outcome: a single source of truth for institutional execution, with transparent updates on scope, timelines, budgets, and risks.
4. Cross-functional collaboration and leadership
- Serve as a partner to the ExCo, Transformation Office, Risk & Performance, Finance, Legal and People teams to ensure alignment between strategic objectives and project execution.
- Support Deans and their teams in building project ownership, planning clarity, and structured follow-through.
- Facilitate alignment between academic and operational initiatives to ensure institutional coherence.
- Build trust and influence across diverse stakeholder groups, acting as a bridge between strategy and delivery.
- Expected outcome: a culture of accountability and structured communication adopted across departments.
5. Capability building and culture development
- Train project leads across all functions on the unified delivery framework and PMO tools.
- Establish a strong community of practice for project managers and coordinators institution-wide.
- Promote a culture of discipline, precision, transparency, and ownership in every stage of project execution.
- Introduce monthly compliance check-ins to reinforce standards and build repeatable delivery habits across teams.
- Expected outcome: 100% adoption of the project management framework across all initiatives and strengthened internal execution muscle.
Safeguarding Policy: Ensure the safety and well-being of all young persons and vulnerable adults with whom we deal, by adhering to ALCHE’s comprehensive safeguarding policy, maintaining a zero-tolerance approach to any violations of safeguarding standards.
Required Experience and Qualifications
- At least a Bachelor’s degree in Project Management, Business, Management Information Systems, or a related field.
- PMP certification is required (additional Agile or Prince2 certifications are an advantage).
- Expertise in project management tools e.g. Asana and JIRA is required.
- Minimum 8 years’ experience successfully managing large-scale, multi-stakeholder strategic projects across digital and non-digital domains.
- Demonstrated experience leading or establishing a PMO, including frameworks, governance, and reporting structures.
- Strong analytical and communication skills, with the ability to translate complex project information into clear insights for executive audiences.
- Proven ability to deliver high-quality outcomes in environments with evolving processes, ambiguity, and high accountability.
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