Head of marhaba Global
dnata - marhaba Services
Total years of experience :16 years, 10 Months
• Accountable for, and leading marhaba’s overall global expansion of its product portfolio, with scope and responsibilities across multiple verticals within a matrix organisation, including strategy, business development, programme management, marketing, pricing, IT, eCommerce, product design, and business development.
• Established a new strategic framework, including a new vision and mission, for marhaba’s future trajectory and growth, and communicating these to all global stakeholders and senior leadership.
• Developed new strategic measures and KPIs to measure the success of marhaba across multiple areas, including operational and financial measures, and ensure the strategy of marhaba is being delivered as intended.
• Led the execution of new product re-design and implementation against newly established strategic direction.
• Hired, established, and directly leading a core team to support the execution on marhaba’s future strategy and vision.
• Establishing and forecasting the department’s budgets and P&L, and developing business cases for selecting optimal opportunities for growth.
• Fostered and built an innovation mind-set, and driven innovation projects, within the Skywards organisation to enable the contribution, evaluation and adoption of ideas.
• Facilitated solicitation of ideas through crowdsourcing, both internal or external through members, partners, universities and start-ups.
• Developed an ecosystem for incubating, testing and prototyping business ideas before releasing them into the mainstream, ensuring minimal disruption to business-as-usual deliverables.
• Identified new ways of working and innovative solutions to existing problems or for new products and facilitate knowledge sharing with the Skywards team and relevant stakeholders.
• Kept abreast of industry standards / processes and initiating trials and site visits for benchmarking, where appropriate.
• Led and effectively managed an intense nine-week programme to create, in coordination with international solution providers and local subject matter experts (SMEs), six demonstrable Proof-of-Concepts (PoCs) to address how to address three challenges within Emirates Airline, namely around the usage of autonomous vehicles, virtual learning and training systems, and personalized experiences.
• Signed two MoUs to conduct further investigations on putting these PoCs into production in the future, and was awarded second place out of 13 for “Future Team Heroes” on realizing the potential of the programme.
• Managed a team of project managers towards successful completion of projects within the SkyCargo portfolio that encompassed both IT and business solutions that bring value to the business, within scope, budget, and schedule. Managed a portfolio budget of approximately 19 million AED while managing expectations and communications with vertical and lateral stakeholders. Projects included enabling a trucking and warehouse solution that allowed seamless connection between DXB and DWC.
• Managed individual projects across the entire SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle), which included requirements analysis, construction, testing, execution and implementation phases. Projects included development of a unified messaging center for the CMS (Content Management System) used by the Skywards department as part of integration of the Emirates.com - Skywards.com sites to further personalise communications to our loyalty members, and a multiple-department upgrade of Q-Pulse, an operational safety application, to introduce new safety features across the organisation.