Senior Project Manager
Tirana
- Organization: UNOPS - United Nations Office for Project Services
- Location: Tirana
- Grade: Mid level - IICA-3, International Individual Contractors Agreement
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Occupational Groups:
- Project and Programme Management
- Managerial positions
- Closing Date: 2025-04-06
Job categories Project Management
Vacancy code VA/2025/B5131/29904
Level ICS-11
Department/office ECR, AUMCO, Albania
Duty station Tirana, Albania
Contract type International ICA
Contract level IICA-3
Duration Open-ended, subject to organizational requirements, availability of funds and satisfactory performance.
Application period 18-Mar-2025 to 06-Apr-2025
Applications to vacancies must be received before midnight Copenhagen time (CET) on the closing date of the announcement.
Functional Responsibilities
The Senior Project Manager is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the project, ensuring efficient service delivery to donors, partners, and beneficiaries. Acting on behalf of the Project Board, they manage the project throughout the Implementation Stage, ensuring outputs are delivered within the defined tolerances of time, cost, quality, scope, risk, and benefits while meeting UNOPS' performance and delivery goals.
For the "EU for Property Rights" project, the Senior Project Manager will lead its implementation, ensuring timely delivery of outputs in accordance with the project’s Description of Action and the legal agreement. They will implement the project using UNOPS project management methodology and in line with EU requirements. Reporting to the UNOPS Albania Country Manager, the Senior Project Manager will oversee budget management, stakeholder coordination, and compliance with UNOPS policies. They will work closely with national authorities, stakeholders, and donors, leading a team of core personnel and experts.
The ideal candidate will have expertise in similar projects, a strong understanding of EU accession processes, and familiarity with the regional context.They will provide strategic guidance on legal, technical, and institutional aspects of national cadastre and property rights reform and support capacity-building initiatives for national institutions and stakeholders to enhance property registration and land administration processes. They will ensure alignment of project activities with EU accession requirements and international best practices.
1. Project Delivery and Performance
2. Procedures
3. Monitoring and reporting
4. Stakeholder engagement
5. Quality assurance
6. Knowledge management and innovation
7. Personnel management
For the "EU for Property Rights" project, the Senior Project Manager will lead its implementation, ensuring timely delivery of outputs in accordance with the project’s Description of Action and the legal agreement. They will implement the project using UNOPS project management methodology and in line with EU requirements. Reporting to the UNOPS Albania Country Manager, the Senior Project Manager will oversee budget management, stakeholder coordination, and compliance with UNOPS policies. They will work closely with national authorities, stakeholders, and donors, leading a team of core personnel and experts.
The ideal candidate will have expertise in similar projects, a strong understanding of EU accession processes, and familiarity with the regional context.They will provide strategic guidance on legal, technical, and institutional aspects of national cadastre and property rights reform and support capacity-building initiatives for national institutions and stakeholders to enhance property registration and land administration processes. They will ensure alignment of project activities with EU accession requirements and international best practices.
1. Project Delivery and Performance
- Develop, complete and update implementation plan
- Implement the approved plan (including the establishment of milestones) within tolerances set by the Project Board.
- Embed sustainability dimensions including social and gender inclusion, environmental and economic aspects into project life span.
- Manage the production of the required outputs, taking responsibility for overall progress and use of resources and initiating corrective action where necessary.
- Ensure that quality of work packages and deliverables complies with the quality requirements defined in the Implementation Plan.
- Liaise with any external suppliers or account managers
- Manage acceptance and delivery of work packages
- Monitor project progress ensuring that work packages are being executed properly
- Control project and work packages changes
- Accept goods, services or works delivered by suppliers
- Lead contract management duties including supplier performance evaluation
- Identify, and anticipate in a timely manner, potential risks and issues and advises mitigating measures to senior management/ Project Board so that maximum benefit to partners and other stakeholders is achieved
- Identify and report to the supervisor potential business opportunities for UNOPS
2. Procedures
- Comply with organizational policies, especially the Project Management Manual.
- Prepare/adapt plans for Project Board approval.
- Manage reporting per Legal Agreement and Implementation Plan.
- Closely collaborate with the Procurement team and experts to prepare procurement requirements, and evaluate tenders
- Maintain project files and record lessons learned.
- Implement financial management guidelines per UNOPS regulations
- Manage budgets, cash flow, and payments to contractors/personnel.
- Understand and manage UNOPS overheads and corporate charges.
- Budget appropriately for UN personnel structures.
- Monitor expenditures against the budget.
- Oversee commitments/disbursements if not a committing officer.
- Ensure a formal project handover for closure.
- Support audit activities and follow up on recommendations.
3. Monitoring and reporting
- Prepare and issue regular project and/or financial reports in accordance with Partner and UNOPS requirements for reporting.
- Regularly review project status, evaluating performance criteria (scope, cost, schedule and quality).
- Maintain diaries and progress reports as required by the organization’s standard procedures.
- Provide routine oversight and analysis of delivery data within the dashboard system.
- Ensure all project team members track and regularly update milestones and targets for the duration of projects' life span
4. Stakeholder engagement
- Develop stakeholder profiles and facilitate the formulation of stakeholder engagement strategies
- Establish solid working relationships with the Project Board (Executive, Senior Users and Senior Suppliers), client and key stakeholders
- Enable the formulation of project communications plans. Coordinate internal project communications. Monitor the effectiveness of project communications
- Coordinate stakeholder engagement and communication, ensuring effective timing and interdependency management of communications. Ensure stakeholders are aware of project activities, progress, exceptions and are in a position to accept handover outputs
5. Quality assurance
- Coordinate quality reviews of project documents and deliverables
- Provide quality control for management outputs (project documents, reports, etc.)
- Work with internal stakeholders to ensure projects comply with audit requirements
- Work with procurement/purchasing staff to ensure effective interface with suppliers' quality systems
6. Knowledge management and innovation
- Encourage routine and effective capacity building activities are conducted in order to build the long-term and sustainable capacity of staff.
- Actively interact with other Project Managers and the wider PM community to share case studies, lessons learned and best practices
- Contribute to the oversight of lessons learned procedures, ensuring that lessons learnt are shared in a timely and appropriate manner. Participate in the relevant Communities of Practice
- Research and logging of lessons learned throughout the project life span.
- Provide feedback to Practice Groups on policy, supporting guidance with an aim towards continuous improvement of UNOPS policies
7. Personnel management
- Lead and motivate the project management team
- Ensure that behavioural expectations of team members are established
- Ensure that performance reviews are conducted fairly, accurately and timely
- Select, recruit and train team and experts as required and take into account gender parity and diversity objectives.
- Ensure safety and security for all project personnel and comply with UNDSS standards
- Create, foster and role model a culture of respect and zero tolerance for discrimination, abuse of authority, harassment, sexual harassment and sexual exploitation and abuse. Ensure accountability for actions and perform duties in accordance with protection mechanisms and action plans, as expected by UNOPS policies, standards and commitments
Education/Experience/Language requirements
Education:
Experience:
Language Requirements:
- Advanced university degree (Master’s or equivalent) preferably in Law, Land Administration, Geospatial Sciences, Public Administration, International Development, or a related field.
- A first-level university degree with additional years of relevant experience may be considered in lieu of an advanced degree.
Experience:
- Minimum 7 years of progressive experience in project management is required;
- Proven track record in procurement and management of contracts and leading multidisciplinary teams of experts and national staff.
- Previous work on EU accession is required;
- Experience in working with national authorities, government agencies, and international donors in EU accession countries is required.
- Experience in the area of digitalisation processes in regards to property rights and land administration is a strong asset.
- Experience in Property rights and land administration is a strong asset;
- Familiarity with UNOPS project management methodologies, financial management, and procurement processes is an asset.
Language Requirements:
- Fluency in English required.
- Knowledge of Albanian languages is an asset.
We do our best to provide you the most accurate info, but closing dates may be wrong on our site. Please check on the recruiting organization's page for the exact info. Candidates are responsible for complying with deadlines and are encouraged to submit applications well ahead.
Before applying, please make sure that you have read the requirements for the position and that you qualify.
Applications from non-qualifying applicants will most likely be discarded by the recruiting manager.
Applications from non-qualifying applicants will most likely be discarded by the recruiting manager.