Senior Project Manager (JHB Illovo) at BDO South Africa

Role purpose

• The Senior Project Manager: Strategic Projects will support the Associate Director: Executive Projects in driving the planning, coordination, governance and delivery of key firm-wide strategic initiatives. The role is responsible for bringing structure, discipline and momentum to priority projects across the firm, ensuring that workstreams are clearly defined, actions are tracked, risks are escalated, and stakeholders remain aligned. This person must be able to work confidently with senior leaders, manage multiple complex priorities, and convert strategic intent into practical execution.

Key responsibilities

• Strategic project delivery
• Manage and coordinate strategic projects from initiation through to delivery. 
• Develop project plans, timelines, milestones, dependencies and action trackers. 
• Ensure projects remain on track, risks are identified early, and issues are escalated appropriately. 
• Translate broad executive decisions into clear workstreams, owners and deadlines. 
• Support the delivery of firm-wide strategic priorities, transformation initiatives, governance projects and operational improvement work. 
• Executive and stakeholder coordination
• Work closely with the Associate Director: Executive Projects, CEO, CFO, COO, EXCO members, partners and senior stakeholders.
• Coordinate input across divisions and ensure contributors understand what is required from them. 
• Prepare clear updates for senior leadership, including project status reports, decision logs and risk summaries. 
• Follow up on actions and hold stakeholders accountable in a professional and constructive way. 
• Support meetings, workshops and strategic sessions by preparing agendas, packs, actions and outputs. 
• Governance, reporting and documentation
• Maintain project governance structures, including project charters, RAID logs, action trackers and status dashboards. 
• Prepare concise, high-quality project reports for executive review. 
• Capture key decisions, risks, dependencies and next steps accurately. 
• Ensure documentation is well organised, current and easy to access. 
• Support continuous improvement in project management tools, templates and reporting standards. 
• Risk, issue and dependency management
• Identify project risks, blockers and interdependencies across workstreams. 
• Escalate issues clearly with proposed solutions. 
• Track unresolved decisions and ensure they are brought to the right forums. 
• Monitor project quality, timelines and delivery expectations. 
• Help prevent strategic projects from becoming delayed, duplicated or poorly governed. 
• Process improvement and execution support
• Identify opportunities to simplify processes, improve coordination and reduce duplication.
• Support the development of practical ways of working for cross-functional projects. 
• Assist with implementation planning for new systems, processes, governance models or strategic initiatives. 
• Bring structure to ambiguous or fast-moving projects. 

Requirements
Qualifications

• Relevant degree or diploma in business, project management, commerce, operations, communications or a related field. 
• Project management certification would be advantageous, for example PMP, PRINCE2, Agile, Scrum or similar. 
• Consulting, transformation or strategy execution experience would be beneficial. 

Required experience

• Minimum 6–8 years’ project management experience, ideally within a corporate, professional services, consulting, financial services or complex matrix environment. 
• Proven experience managing strategic, cross-functional or executive-level projects. 
• Strong experience working with senior stakeholders and leadership teams. 
• Experience preparing executive-level reports, dashboards, presentations and project updates. 
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously. 
• Experience with project governance, risk tracking, milestone management and stakeholder follow-up. 
• Exposure to strategy execution, transformation, operations, governance or business improvement projects would be advantageous. 

Required skills and competencies

• Strong project management discipline. 
• Excellent organisational and follow-through skills. 
• Ability to create structure from ambiguity. 
• Strong written and verbal communication skills. 
• Executive-level stakeholder management. 
• Commercial judgement and business understanding. 
• High attention to detail. 
• Ability to work under pressure and manage competing deadlines. 
• Confident but professional approach to driving accountability. 
• Strong problem-solving ability. 
• Ability to work independently with limited supervision. 
• High discretion and confidentiality. 

Technical skills

• Advanced Microsoft Office skills, particularly PowerPoint, Excel and Word. 
• Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and project tracking tools. 
• Experience with tools such as Monday.com, MS Project, Planner, Jira, Asana or ClickUp would be beneficial. 
• Ability to build clear dashboards, trackers and reporting templates.