Founded in Switzerland in 1968, Zühlke is owned by its partners and located across Europe and Asia. We are a global transformation partner, with engineering and innovation in our DNA. We're trusted to help clients envision and build their businesses for the future – to run smarter today while adapting for tomorrow’s markets, customers, and communities. Our multidisciplinary teams specialise in tech strategy and business innovation, digital solutions and applications, and device and systems engineering. We excel in complex, regulated spaces including health and finance, connecting strategy, tech implementation, and operational services to help clients become more effective, resilient businesses.
If you share our values and want to do the best work, for the right reasons, we can offer you the chance to do it on a global scale and play a real role in shaping our exciting journey.
The role
We are looking for an experienced project delivery leader with a pragmatic mindset to lead our IT Project Services (ITPS) domain within the IT Service & Project Management (ITSPM) area and to personally drive our most strategic initiatives. You are accountable for building and developing a strong Project Services team, growing the capabilities of our Project Managers and Business Analysts while ensuring effective delivery across our IT portfolio.
You lead a team of Project Managers and Business Analysts as their people manager, and at the same time stay close to delivery by acting as a Senior Project Manager on selected projects. Working within our synchronised sprint heartbeat and our Azure DevOps and OnePlan tooling, you translate business needs into effective IT solutions and, together with the Group Head of IT Service & Project Management, keep our portfolio transparent, prioritised and under control.
As the IT Project Services domain matures within the IT Service & Project Management area, this role offers a path toward broader portfolio and delivery leadership, depending on organisationalneeds and individual strengths.
How you will make impact
- You lead and develop our Project Managers and Business Analysts, setting clear expectations, providing regular feedback and coaching, and actively mentoring less experienced team members as they grow into greater responsibility. You build the capabilities of the domain as a whole, strengthening project management and business analysis practices, fostering knowledge sharing, and creating development opportunities across different levels of seniority.
- You balance and steer the domain’s capacity across concurrent projects, resolve team conflicts, and remove impediments so the teams can keep progressing.
- You personally lead selected strategic projects from the idea to the handover into operation, acting as a Senior Project Manager and mentor for a project team (typically 2–5 people) from different IT and business domains and often distributed across several countries.
- You establish pragmatic and consistent ways of working across projects, combining appropriate governance with iterative delivery and adapting the approach to the needs of each initiative.
- You help the teams focus on delivering an increment of value every sprint, support a healthy and well-refined project backlog, and foster continuous improvement (inspect & adapt).
- You identify, track and mitigate project and program risks, facilitate planning adjustments, and enable cross-team collaboration and communication.
- Together with the Group Head of IT Service & Project Management, you shape and run the project management process and its lightweight governance, and you visualise and limit work in progress (WIP) across the portfolio.
- You establish and maintain a lightweight, consistent project governance baseline for every project – clear goals, a right-sized project plan with staffing, budget oversight, a stakeholder matrix and regular reporting.
- You contribute to Demand Management, helping to capture, assess, refine and prioritise incoming demand in alignment with our objectives.
- You identify and manage stakeholders and facilitate collaboration and communication between business and IT, championing the Lean-Agile mindset across the IT function and the wider Zühlke services.
- You work fluently in Azure DevOps for operational planning and in OnePlan for portfolio management, with Freshservice as the entry point for demand and service management.
What’s important to us
- You have a degree in IT or computer science, or equivalent practical experience.
- You bring at least 5 years of professional experience in project management, ideally including IT or cross-domain initiatives.
- You have experience leading and coaching teams and enjoy developing people, ideally with people manager responsibility.
- You have strong knowledge and hands-on experience with modern, iterative project management approaches, and you enjoy working in a flexible, collaborative environment that adapts quickly to change.
- You feel comfortable in a technical environment and have a good understanding of business administration.
- You are familiar with portfolio and backlog tooling such as Azure DevOps and OnePlan (or comparable), and with structured demand and prioritisation practices – this is a plus.
- You are structured, pragmatic and hands-on, with strong facilitation and communication skills.
- You can communicate confidently in English in our international environment; German language skills are a plus.
- To be considered for this role, you must be based in Portugal or Serbia.
If you feel you don't meet all the requirements, we are still happy to get to know you, learn more about your ambitions and ideas and look forward to receiving your application!
We welcome people from all backgrounds, regardless of their gender, personality, national origin, race, religion, colour, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, marital status, disability or veteran status.
