Chief Operating Officer
iMENA Digital
Total years of experience :10 years, 3 Months
Finance and Accounting management: Responsible for managing different financial aspects of the company in coordination with the financial department, which entails producing financial and sales pipeline reports, preparing annual budgets, also reviewing and conducting quality control of our client contracts, in order to ensure compliance with corporate and/or business unit guidelines.
Human Resources and Administration management: Coordinate and improve several administrative and human resources processes, which included the introduction of performance reviews, organizational structure, recruitment, documentation of job descriptions, payroll, contracts, employee expenses and different aspects of procurement among other administrative issues.
Operations management: Establish and manage internal work processes and policies related to the different aspects of the business, which included identifying gaps/needs as well as ensuring continuous improvement of company processes and policies. This was also coupled with directing internal operations to achieve budgeted results and other financial criteria within broad organizational goals and objectives.
Business Development: Prepare and present business proposals to acquire new business for the organization, in addition to following up on business leads, as well as building and maintaining good relationships with stakeholders.
Project Management: Led and managed a project for the Jordan Workforce Development Project - USAID-DAI which aims at identifying and analysing the sentiment of the online community with regards to the Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) sector in Jordan; enabling the findings to be used in creating a country-wide strategy for empowering and enhancing the sector.
Key Achievements: Defined and introduced policies and processes for business operations; establishing of a new organizational structure; preparation of company’s annual budgets; designed and implemented a project pricing model that is being used by management for pricing several major projects.
Research & report management: Led the research division reporting directly to the GM, liaising between clients and the research team, setting research plans and deliverables, ensuring quality standards of reports produced, and allocating report topics and workload. Designed sample and questionnaires as well as management of survey (quantitative & qualitative) based consulting projects, personally advising/managing across all aspects starting from sample size, segmentation, and margins of errors to questionnaire design. I also supervised the running of focus groups with end users on behalf of clients. In addition to designing and running live surveys, I also managed, structured, monitored and conducted end-user interviews via telephone or face to face.
Consulting project management: Managed and coordinated consultancy projects for clients including Booz Allen, Bain & Company, A.T. Kearney, Vodafone Egypt, the United Nations Economic & Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), BBC World Service and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). As such, I was the main proposal writer for the company on the projects and led on project costing as well as attending business development meetings with Sales, assigning resources, monitoring progress and liaising directly with clients throughout the project process. The projects involved a high degree of analytics such as trend analysis, forecasting and market modelling, and planning.
Team management: Also coached, managed, motivated and evaluated a team of 13 research analysts and project managers, as well as a new in-house survey call centre; as such, I edited reports, trained and monitored the team in quality standards, and implemented a mentoring system to improve retention within the team.
Key Achievements: Led the research team to an improved rate of validated, published reports - over 540 in just one year; improved retention in research team three-fold by the time I had left; successfully managed client consulting projects to completion often in fast-turnaround situations.
To become senior analysts researchers have to hit a key ‘milestone’ of a certain number and standard of reports published. I was the first research analyst to achieve this milestone within one year, as a result of which I was promoted.
• Research: Now focusing on Jordan and Bahrain as well as other MENA markets, I continued to research and produce regular and ad hoc reports on the telecommunication and media markets, but had additional responsibility for the quality of the reports.
• Consultancy projects: I also participated in, and led, a number of consultancy projects for corporate and government clients, for which I met with the clients and managed teams of researchers; consultancy projects I led included (i) a survey-based project to establish ICT usage in households in the State of Qatar;(ii) a study of the market entry opportunities in the MENA region (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, KSA, U.A.E. and Egypt) for a global market player; (iii) a project on VSAT technologies in selected global economies.
• Achievements: Personally authored over 130 reports, with a number of my reports picked up by global research database companies; also managed client consultancy projects to time and client brief.
Conducted research on the telecommunications and media markets in specific countries - Tunisia, Morocco and Bahrain.
• Personally researched, analysed and produced reports on telecommunications and media sectors.
• Also participated in bespoke consultancy projects relating to the telecommunication and media sectors.
• In my first year I had more than 40 reports validated and published, the highest number of reports for any first-tier researcher in the firm.
• Designed and developed software products as part of a team;
• Performed quality assurance procedures, including product testing;
• Implemented the company’s marketing efforts, with a focus on online marketing;
• Promoted company products through presentations to potential clients;
• Developed documentation manuals for products.
The Kingston MBA is accredited by the Association of MBAs (AMBA). Students are selected carefully an
Elected as Project Manager of a team of four during my final year project at university, which focused on the development of an innovative tool to aid in the learning of a new computer programming language
- 4 “A” Levels - 7 “O” Levels