The posting
Job Description
Position Overview
We are looking for an experienced and strategic Project Director to provide leadership and oversight across a portfolio of projects, ensuring successful delivery against business objectives, client expectations, financial targets, quality standards, and timelines.
The Project Director will be responsible for establishing strong portfolio governance, managing financial and operational performance, identifying and mitigating risks, managing senior stakeholders, optimising resources, and driving continuous improvement and innovation across the project delivery organisation.
The role requires a strong combination of strategic thinking, commercial acumen, delivery expertise, stakeholder management, and people leadership.
Key Responsibilities
1. Portfolio Delivery
- Provide overall leadership and strategic oversight for a portfolio of projects/programs.
- Ensure projects are delivered within agreed scope, timelines, quality parameters, and commercial commitments.
- Establish portfolio-level priorities and ensure alignment with organisational and client objectives.
- Monitor portfolio performance through appropriate delivery metrics, dashboards, and review mechanisms.
- Identify delivery dependencies, bottlenecks, and cross-project challenges and drive timely resolution.
- Ensure effective transition of projects from initiation through execution, closure, and post-delivery review.
- Establish mechanisms to identify early warning signals and intervene proactively on projects requiring management attention.
- Ensure consistent application of delivery standards and best practices across the portfolio.
- Drive accountability among Project Managers and delivery leaders for project outcomes.
2. Project Governance
- Establish and maintain a robust governance framework across the project portfolio.
- Define governance structures, roles, responsibilities, escalation mechanisms, and decision-making processes.
- Conduct regular portfolio reviews with Project Managers, Delivery Heads, and senior leadership.
- Establish appropriate governance forums with clients and internal stakeholders.
- Monitor project health, milestones, deliverables, dependencies, issues, and escalations.
- Ensure timely and accurate portfolio reporting to senior management.
- Review project change requests, scope variations, major deviations, and critical escalations.
- Ensure adherence to organisational policies, delivery methodologies, contractual commitments, and quality standards.
- Drive effective project closure and lessons-learned processes.
3. Financial Management
- Own financial performance and commercial health of the assigned project portfolio.
- Monitor revenue, margins, budgets, costs, billing, utilisation, and profitability.
- Partner with Finance and Business teams to establish and monitor project budgets and financial forecasts.
- Review project estimates, resource costs, commercial assumptions, and financial risks.
- Identify and address margin leakage, cost overruns, under-utilisation, and revenue risks.
- Monitor project financial performance against approved business plans.
- Ensure appropriate commercial governance around scope changes, additional requirements, and change requests.
- Provide regular financial insights and forecasts to senior management.
- Drive financial accountability among project and delivery leaders.
4. Risk & Stakeholder Management
Risk Management
- Establish a proactive portfolio-level risk management framework.
- Identify, assess, prioritise, and mitigate delivery, financial, operational, contractual, resource, and client-related risks.
- Maintain visibility of critical risks, issues, dependencies, and mitigation plans.
- Ensure high-impact risks are escalated appropriately and addressed within defined timelines.
- Develop contingency plans for critical projects and business scenarios.
- Drive root-cause analysis for recurring delivery issues.
Stakeholder Management
- Build and maintain strong relationships with key client stakeholders and internal leadership.
- Act as a senior escalation point for strategic and critical client matters.
- Lead executive-level client reviews and portfolio discussions where required.
- Understand stakeholder expectations and proactively manage communication.
- Ensure transparency around project performance, risks, challenges, and corrective actions.
- Build trust with clients through consistent delivery, responsiveness, and effective issue resolution.
- Partner with Sales, Pre-Sales, Finance, HR, Technology, and Delivery teams to ensure cross-functional alignment.
5. Team & Resource Management
- Lead and mentor Project Managers, Program Managers, Delivery Managers, and other project leadership resources.
- Ensure effective allocation and utilisation of resources across the portfolio.
- Forecast future resource requirements based on project pipeline and business demand.
- Identify resource gaps and work with relevant functions to address hiring, deployment, and capability requirements.
- Build a strong pipeline of project and delivery leadership talent.
- Establish clear performance expectations and accountability across project leadership teams.
- Coach project leaders on delivery, stakeholder management, financial management, risk management, and leadership.
- Promote collaboration and knowledge sharing across project teams.
- Identify skill gaps and drive appropriate training and development initiatives.
- Support succession planning for critical delivery roles.
6. Portfolio Process & Continuous Improvement
- Establish and continuously improve portfolio delivery processes, standards, and frameworks.
- Identify inefficiencies, recurring challenges, and process gaps across projects.
- Drive standardisation of project management practices, templates, reporting, and governance mechanisms.
- Establish and monitor delivery KPIs and operational metrics.
- Conduct portfolio-level retrospectives and ensure lessons learned are translated into actionable improvements.
- Promote data-driven decision-making across project delivery.
- Identify opportunities to improve productivity, quality, turnaround time, resource utilisation, and client experience.
- Evaluate and implement appropriate project management tools and methodologies.
- Benchmark delivery practices against industry standards and emerging practices.
7. Organisation-Level Innovation & Initiatives
- Lead strategic initiatives that improve the organisation's project delivery capabilities.
- Identify and drive opportunities for technology adoption, automation, AI, process transformation, and delivery innovation.
- Develop and implement organisation-wide frameworks, methodologies, and best practices.
- Lead cross-functional initiatives that require coordination across multiple business functions.
- Encourage a culture of innovation, experimentation, and continuous improvement.
- Identify opportunities to create scalable solutions and reusable delivery frameworks.
- Sponsor initiatives aimed at improving operational efficiency, client experience, profitability, and employee capability.
- Present strategic recommendations and transformation initiatives to senior management.
- Act as a change leader for major organisational and delivery transformations.
Key Stakeholder Interactions
The Project Director will work closely with:
- Executive Leadership / Management
- Business Unit Heads
- Delivery & Operations Leadership
- Project & Program Managers
- Sales & Business Development
- Pre-Sales / Solutioning
- Finance
- HR
- Technology / Engineering
- Quality / Process Teams
- Clients and Senior Client Stakeholders
- External Partners / Vendors
Required Experience & Qualifications
- 15+ years of experience in project/program/portfolio management or delivery leadership, preferably in a technology, digital, consulting, learning solutions, or services environment.
- Significant experience managing multiple projects or a large portfolio of projects simultaneously.
- Demonstrated experience managing large and distributed teams.
- Strong understanding of project financials, budgets, revenue, margins, utilisation, and commercial management.
- Proven experience in senior-level client and stakeholder management.
- Strong experience in project governance, risk management, escalation management, and delivery assurance.
- Experience managing complex, multi-disciplinary, and cross-functional programs.
- Strong understanding of Agile and/or other project delivery methodologies.
- Experience driving process improvement and organisation-level transformation initiatives.
- Strong business and commercial acumen.
- Excellent communication, presentation, negotiation, and executive stakeholder-management skills.
Preferred:
- PMP / PRINCE2 / PMI certifications or equivalent project/program management credentials.
- Agile/Scrum certification or demonstrated experience in Agile environments.
- Experience with project portfolio management tools and data-driven delivery governance.
Key Competencies
Portfolio Leadership | Strategic Thinking | Delivery Excellence | Project Governance | Financial Acumen | Risk Management | Stakeholder Management | Commercial Awareness | Resource Planning | People Leadership | Process Excellence | Continuous Improvement | Innovation | Change Management | Executive Communication | Decision Making
Key Success Measures / KRAs
Area
Key Success Measures
Portfolio Delivery
On-time, on-budget and quality delivery across the portfolio
Project Governance
Governance adherence, timely reporting, effective escalation and decision-making
Financial Management
Revenue, margin, budget adherence, cost control and reduction of financial leakage
Risk Management
Early identification, mitigation and resolution of critical risks and issues
Stakeholder Management
Client satisfaction, stakeholder engagement and effective resolution of escalations
Team & Resource Management
Resource utilisation, capacity planning, team productivity and leadership capability
Process Excellence
Standardisation, process maturity, productivity and operational efficiency
Continuous Improvement
Number and impact of implemented process and delivery improvements
Innovation
Successful implementation of technology, automation and organisation-level initiatives
People Development
Leadership development, succession planning, mentoring and capability building
Business Impact
Contribution to profitability, scalability, client retention and overall business objectives
Our Offerings for Employee Benefits
- Health Insurance for Employee+Spouse+Two Children+Parents
- Term Life Insurance
- GPA – For Employee
- Hybrid working
- Compliance – PF and Gratuity
About Academian
Website: www.academian.com
Academian is a carve-out of an existing 22-year IT company – Intraedge Inc (www.intraedge.com)
Academian is a service, product, and learning development company in the education domain with a current
headcount of 500+ team members. We are rapidly becoming a leading force in the education technology space.
We specialize in delivering innovative services, products, and learning development solutions tailored for the education sector. Our expertise spans across K-12, higher education, professional institutions, publishers, online program managers (OPMs), and corporate learning environments.
At Academian, we combine deep industry knowledge with a product-oriented design approach, enabling us to craft high-impact learning experiences and technology solutions. From content development and media production to strategic staffing and custom software development, we support every phase of the educational lifecycle.
Our Specialties Include:
- EdTech Solutions: LMS, CMS, Custom Software, Cloud Architecture
- Digital Learning: Content Design, Learning Experience Design, Accessibility, Media Development
- Education Services: K-12, Higher Education, Workforce Development, Publishing & Prepress
- Strategic Services: Product Management, Strategic Consulting, Technology & Digital Transformation, Staffing.
We’re passionate about shaping the future of learning—and we’re looking for talented, mission-driven individuals to grow with us.
Join our team and be part of building meaningful solutions that make a real impact in education.
EdTech with Academian | Your Digital Transformation Partner
We deliver innovative EdTech solutions and craft custom eLearning experiences. Drive digital transformation with our advanced technology & DEIB commitment.
