Role Summary

The Project Manager will lead the planning, execution, and monitoring of the AI Centre of Excellence (CoE) roadmap, ensuring successful delivery of outcomes within scope, schedule, and budget. The role requires close coordination between the university, faculty, industry partners, and technical teams, ensuring governance compliance, financial transparency, and risk mitigation.

Location: Bhubaneswar

Engagement: Permanent

Key Responsibilities

Planning & Delivery Execution

• Develop and maintain a detailed project implementation plan with milestones and dependencies.
• Coordinate governance reviews, track progress, and manage project risks and change controls.
• Align technical delivery with AI engineers to ensure timely achievement of lab and infrastructure goals.
• Oversee infrastructure setup (cloud credits, GPU servers, smart classrooms) through to successful deployment.

Governance, Reporting & Compliance

• Represent the PMO in Steering Committee meetings and report progress to the CoE Director.
• Establish governance dashboards, issue/risk registers, and ensure timely reporting cycles.
• Ensure compliance with AI ethics, institutional standards, and data governance frameworks.
• Maintain comprehensive documentation to support audits, knowledge transfer, and transparency.

Stakeholder & Academic Coordination

• Engage Deans, Faculty Champions, and department heads to integrate CoE outputs with academic and research programmes.
• Facilitate industry MoUs and ensure their linkage to student capstones, internships, and research pilots.
• Drive student and faculty engagement through hackathons, electives, and innovation challenges.
• Support faculty incentive rollout and monitor participation across labs and academic clusters.

Financial, Vendor & Resource Management

• Manage project budgets, forecasts, and expenditure variance against approved milestones.
• Oversee vendor onboarding, contracts, and SLA compliance for infrastructure and software services.
• Maintain transparent cost dashboards and provide financial reporting to the Steering Committee.
• Ensure efficient allocation of internal and external delivery resources across project workstreams.

Knowledge Transfer (KT) & Sustainability

• Track and document knowledge transfer across documentation, co-delivery, and reverse shadowing phases.
• Develop operational playbooks and runbooks to support university self-sufficiency post-handover.
• Mentor internal PMO and administrative staff to strengthen delivery governance capabilities.
• Ensure post-handover readiness by validating operational independence for at least one academic quarter.

Skills & Competencies

• Strong project delivery background (Agile, PMP, PRINCE2).
• Skilled in stakeholder management, budgeting, and operational governance.
• Excellent leadership, presentation, and communication skills.
• Resilient under pressure and adaptive learner.
• Structured problem-solver, and analytical decision-maker.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s in engineering, Management, or related discipline.
• 8–10 years’ experience in project/programme management.
• PMP/PRINCE2/Agile certification desirable.
• Experience in IT or AI transformation projects preferred.