Business Initiatives Lead

Job Title / Position: Business Initiatives Lead

Reports To:              Head of Business Excellence 

Location:                 Dangote Petroleum Refinery and Petrochemicals FZE.

Job Summary 

The Business Initiatives Lead is responsible for the governance and integrity of DPRP’s internal strategic improvement portfolio. The role owns the unified improvement register, manages the initiative lifecycle from intake to close-out, and ensures that the benefits committed at approval are tracked and verified. The role works across all functions and is accountable for the discipline and rigour of improvement governance across the site initiatives.

Key Duties and Responsibilities 

Initiative Governance
• Maintain the improvement and initiative portfolio registers; ensure records are current, complete, and accurately reflect the status of all active work.
• Run intake and governance gates: confirm that each initiative has a defined sponsor, owner, milestones, benefits case, risks, and dependencies before it is approved to proceed.
• Monitor initiative status across the portfolio; identify at-risk items early and escalate to the Head of Business Excellence with a clear assessment.
• Work with the CI Lead to ensure RCA-derived initiatives are captured in the register and tracked to verified close-out.

Benefits Tracking and Close-out
• Verify that benefits are being realised against the commitments made at approval; engage the CFO and relevant function heads where financial validation is required.
• Ensure that lessons learned and close-out evidence are documented before initiatives are marked complete.
• Produce portfolio health reports for the Head of Business Excellence and ExCo, covering status, benefits realisation, overdue actions, and risks.

Project Management
• Support each Initiative Lead with Project Management expertise
• Ensure all initiatives have fully developed project plans that are reported out.
• Support Initiative Leads with tools to assist with tracking progress
• Support Initiative Leads with cross functional facilitation to unlock constraints.
• Keep overall tracking of progress on all the Initiatives.

Performance and Reporting
• Prepare regular portfolio health packs for the Head of Business Excellence and ExCo, covering the initiative pipeline, benefits status, and items requiring escalation.
• Contribute improvement portfolio data to the Business Excellence monthly performance pack.
• Track overall Initiative load on the organisation and resolve/clarify conflicts on resources to manage the Initiatives successfully.

Key Requirements

Education and Work Experience
• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Business, Finance, or a related discipline.
• At least 7 years in programme or portfolio management, business improvement, or operational excellence, with experience in refining, petrochemicals, or a comparable heavy industrial environment.
• Demonstrated experience managing improvement portfolios across multiple functions, including benefits tracking and governance.
• Comfortable working with financial data; able to validate and interrogate benefit cases with confidence.
• Experience with external benchmarking programmes, including Solomon or equivalent, is an advantage.

Functional Competencies Must-have:
• Able to design and run portfolio governance processes that are practical and consistently applied across the business.
• Maintains register accuracy and completeness as a non-negotiable standard; recognises that a portfolio which is not current is not a reliable basis for decisions.
• Produces clear written outputs; portfolio packs and escalation notes are well-structured and self-explanatory.
• Able to work with the CFO and function heads on financial benefit validation; financially confident without overstepping into financial management.

Soft skills:
• Achieves results through initiative sponsors and owners who do not report to this role.
• Holds initiative owners to agreed milestones in a professional manner; focused on outcomes.
• Exercises sound judgement when navigating priority and sequencing decisions across competing functions and agendas.
• Excellence in facilitation and problem-solving skills to assist with unlocking constrained initiatives.