OBJECTIVE OF THE OFFICE/DEPARTMENT

This is a requisition for employment at the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)/Regional Office of the World Health Organization (WHO)

Contractual Agreement:

Non-Staff - International PAHO Consultant

Job Posting:

August 20, 2026

Closing Date:

September 7, 2026, 11:59 PM Eastern Time

Primary Location:

Off Site

Organization:

ITS Information Technology Services

Schedule:

Full time

PURPOSE OF CONSULTANCY

This requisition is for a consultancy at the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO)/Regional Office of the World Health Organization (WHO).

1. Objective of the Department
The Information Technology Services Department (ITS) provides leadership and direction in the deployment of information and communication technologies and systems to support the Pan American Health Organization/Regional Office of the Americas of the World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) in carrying out its mandate. ITS is organized into three units — Business Solutions, Information Security, and Infrastructure and Operations — and serves approximately 2,500 users across Headquarters, country offices, and specialized centers throughout the Region of the Americas.

DESCRIPTION OF DUTIES:

2. Purpose of the Consultancy

PAHO has been working with the United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC) to evolve its project management practices. That work has established the direction; it now requires sustained execution capacity inside ITS.

ITS is concurrently delivering a portfolio of critical corporate initiatives. These initiatives share dependencies, compete for the same technical resources, involve multiple external partners, and are visible to senior management and Member States. They are largely managed by technical leads carrying substantial line responsibilities in parallel, which limits the consistency of planning, risk management, reporting, and benefits tracking across the portfolio.

At the same time, the project management profession is being reshaped by artificial intelligence. Status consolidation, meeting capture and action extraction, plan and estimate drafting, risk and dependency detection, document production, and stakeholder communication can now be substantially accelerated by AI tooling, while judgment, negotiation, accountability, and stakeholder leadership remain irreducibly human. PAHO is not seeking a project manager who is merely aware of these tools, but a practitioner who already delivers this way and can bring that practice into ITS.

PAHO therefore requires an experienced IT Project Manager consultant to (i) directly manage an assigned set of ITS critical projects through to delivery, (ii) raise the maturity and consistency of project management practice across the ITS portfolio in continuity with the UNICC engagement, and (iii) establish AI-enabled delivery methods and reusable assets that ITS staff can sustain after the consultancy ends.

This is a hands-on, delivery-focused consultancy. Practice improvement is expected to result from live project work, not from a parallel methodology exercise. The consultant reports to the Director, ITS, works autonomously on a prioritized portfolio and task backlog, and formally reports each month. Institutional accountability for project decisions, expenditure approval, and staff supervision remains with PAHO staff at all times.

3. Statement of Work

3.1 Handling of Assigned Critical Projects

• Work with the Business Relationship Manager and business owners to validate the business need, expected value, urgency, organizational readiness, dependencies, and alignment with PAHO priorities before projects are initiated or re-prioritized.

• Assume day-to-day project management responsibility for an assigned portfolio of ITS critical projects.

• Produce and maintain, for each assigned project, a charter defining objectives, scope, success criteria, expected benefits, sponsor, governance, budget, and constraints; and an integrated plan with a defined baseline, critical path, resources, dependencies, and milestone acceptance criteria.

• Support project delivery by coordinating with PAHO technical resources, vendors, and partner teams; facilitate planning and review cadences appropriate to the delivery method (predictive, agile, or hybrid); identify impediments and refer unresolved matters through the appropriate escalation channel.

• Maintain risk, issue, decision, and dependency registers with named owners, responses, and review dates; escalate material risks with a recommendation rather than merely reporting them. Monitor inter-project dependencies and highlight potential conflicts involving shared platforms or resources

• Prepare and facilitate project board, steering committee, and sponsor reviews, including decision papers, options analysis, and documented decisions and actions.

• Liaise with Business Relationship Manager to maintain stakeholder mapping, engagement and communication plans, business feedback checkpoints, escalation paths, and adoption activities throughout the project lifecycle. Support stakeholder engagement, organizational change, communication, and adoption activities required for solutions to be used, not merely deployed.

• Assess change impacts and business readiness, including process changes, communications, training, user support, adoption risks, and readiness criteria before implementation.

• Drive projects to formal closure, including operational transition, documentation handover, budget reconciliation, lessons learned, confirmation of business ownership, and an agreed approach to measuring adoption and benefits after implementation.

3.2 Project Management Practice, Governance & UNICC Continuity

• Assess the practices, templates, governance instruments, and tooling introduced through the UNICC engagement against actual delivery behavior; identify gaps and propose a proportionate operating standard for ITS.

• Exploit PAHO's existing corporate tooling like Microsoft 365, Planner, Power Platform, Power BI, and the Salesforce-based service management platform, for project and portfolio management, rather than introducing new licensed tools absent an approved business case.

• Coach ITS technical leads and project focal points acting as project managers, through working sessions on live projects rather than classroom training alone.

3.3 AI-Enabled Project Delivery

• Apply AI tooling to the consultant's own delivery work — plan and schedule drafting, estimate challenge, meeting capture and action extraction, status synthesis, risk and dependency identification, requirements and document drafting, and stakeholder communication, and evidence the effect on cycle time and quality.

• Automate the collection and consolidation of project status from source systems, so portfolio reporting is generated from live data with human review rather than manual status-chasing.

• Advise ITS management on which AI capabilities in project and portfolio management are mature enough for institutional adoption and which should remain experimental, with rationale, cost implication, and evidence — without overstating capability. Train ITS staff on the methods and assets established so the practice survives the consultancy.

3.4 Portfolio Reporting, Assurance & Vendor Oversight

• Establish and maintain a single consolidated view of the ITS project portfolio and issue a portfolio status report on an agreed cadence, covering status against baseline, milestones, budget consumption and forecast, top risks and issues, decisions required, and dependencies.

• Maintain visibility of competing business demands, shared resources, cross-project dependencies, and capacity constraints, and provide recommendations to support realistic prioritization, sequencing, and delivery commitments.

• Provide ITS management and PAHO senior management with objective, evidence-based reporting, including on projects that are underperforming, translating delivery detail into business outcomes, options, and decision requests.

• Conduct delivery assurance reviews (health checks) on ITS projects not directly managed by the consultant, when requested, with findings and remediation recommendations.

• Coordinate vendor and partner performance on assigned projects, including UNICC, Microsoft, and contracted service providers; monitor deliverables against contracted scope, milestones, and acceptance criteria; validate quality before recommending acceptance; document non-conformance.

• Support the preparation of terms of reference, statements of work, and evaluation criteria for project-related procurement, in coordination with the responsible PAHO units.

• Track project budgets, commitments, expenditure, and forecast-to-complete; identify variance early and propose corrective options. Approval of expenditure remains with the responsible PAHO officials.

3.5 Documentation, Reporting & Knowledge Transfer

• Maintain complete project documentation: charters, plans, registers, decision records, change requests, acceptance evidence, closure reports, and lessons learned in PAHO-approved repositories, so that any qualified project manager could assume the portfolio without reliance on undocumented knowledge.

• Store all templates, prompt libraries, agent configurations, automation flows, and work products in PAHO-approved repositories with version control. All such assets are the property of PAHO.

• Confirm operational readiness before closure, including support ownership, service documentation, access and security requirements, ongoing costs, unresolved items, and post-launch support arrangements.

• Deliver structured knowledge-transfer and enablement sessions to ITS staff, submit the monthly activity report, and prepare an end-of-contract handover pack covering portfolio status, open risks and issues, vendor positions, and recommended next steps.

4. Monthly Report

Monthly activity report. By the last working day of each month the consultant shall submit a consolidated report to the Director, ITS, traceable to the designated work-management system, covering: an executive summary and register of all assigned and open items; per project, status against baseline scope, schedule and budget, milestones due, achieved and missed, change requests, top risks and issues with owner and response, and decisions required; reasons, impact and approved revised dates for delayed, blocked or re-scoped items; progress against the framework, vendor performance on assigned projects; and risks, constraints, recommendations, and focus for the following month. Certification of the monthly deliverable is contingent on receipt of a complete report.

5. Qualifications & Skills

5.1 Education & Experience

• University degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Business Administration, Project Management, or a related field. An advanced degree is desirable.

• At least five years of progressively responsible experience managing IT projects in complex enterprise environments, of which at least five years managing multiple concurrent projects with budgets, external vendors, and executive-level sponsors.

• Demonstrated experience managing enterprise applications, cloud, data, and infrastructure projects, not solely software development, including at least one full lifecycle from initiation through operational handover and benefits confirmation.

• Demonstrated experience with more than one delivery method (predictive, agile, hybrid) and the judgment to tailor the method to the initiative rather than applying one approach uniformly.

• Demonstrated experience establishing or materially improving project management practice, governance, or a PMO function, including standards, stage gates, tooling, and reporting subsequently adopted and sustained.

• Demonstrated, verifiable experience applying AI tooling in the delivery of real projects, for example status and reporting automation, meeting and action capture, planning and estimation support, risk detection, document production, or purpose-built agents, with the ability to describe the tools used, the workflow changed, the safeguards applied, and the measured effect. Candidates will be asked to demonstrate this during selection.

• Demonstrated experience managing external vendors and systems integrators against contracted scope, milestones, and acceptance criteria.

• Experience in a multicultural, geographically distributed environment; experience in a UN system organization, international organization, or the public health sector is a strong asset.

• Experience delivering on Microsoft 365 and Power Platform, Salesforce, Workday, or comparable enterprise platforms, and with organizational change management as an explicit project responsibility, is desirable.

5.2 Competencies

Project & Portfolio Delivery: Scope definition and control, work breakdown, integrated scheduling and critical path, estimation, baselining and change control, resource and dependency management, milestone acceptance, stage gates, closure and operational handover, benefits tracking, portfolio prioritization and sequencing; PMBOK, PRINCE2, Agile (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe) and hybrid models; delivery assurance and health checks

Risk, Issue & Change: Risk identification, quantification, response planning and ownership; issue escalation paths; decision and assumption logs; change impact assessment; contingency and schedule reserve; early-warning indicators; escalation with recommendation

AI-Enabled Delivery: Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio agents, Power Platform and Power Automate, prompt engineering and reusable prompt libraries, automated status consolidation and reporting from source systems, meeting capture and action extraction, AI-assisted planning and estimation challenge, risk detection, document and requirements drafting, grounding on governed repositories, verification and human-in-the-loop controls, responsible AI and data protection practice

Tooling & Systems: Microsoft 365, Planner and Project, Teams, SharePoint, Power BI portfolio reporting, Salesforce-based IT service management, Azure DevOps or comparable backlog tooling, executive dashboarding

Financial & Vendor Management: Project budgeting, commitment and expenditure tracking, forecast-to-complete and variance analysis, business case construction, terms of reference and statement of work drafting, vendor performance monitoring, deliverable acceptance, contract-aware escalation

Stakeholder & Executive Engagement: Sponsor and steering committee management, negotiation and conflict resolution, priority arbitration across competing demands, executive communication and decision framing, organizational change management, training and adoption, coaching of project focal points

Personal Effectiveness: Autonomy against a prioritized backlog, structured written communication, evidence-based and candid reporting including adverse findings, discretion with sensitive institutional information, cultural sensitivity, resilience under competing pressures

5.3 Certifications & Languages

PMP or PRINCE2 Practitioner is required or strongly preferred. PgMP, Agile certification (PMI-ACP, CSM, SAFe), ITIL Foundation, MSP, PfMP, and Microsoft AI or Power Platform certifications are desirable. Certification alone will not be treated as evidence of delivery capability; demonstrated project outcomes carry greater weight.

Fluency in written and spoken English is required. Working knowledge of Spanish is required, given the distribution of PAHO country offices and stakeholders across the Region. Portuguese or French is an asset.

6. Key Performance Indicators

• Assigned tasks and deliverables completed by the agreed target date
  • Target: ≥ 90%
  • Measured: Monthly

• Assigned project milestones delivered within the approved baseline, or re-baselined through approved change control before the date is missed
  • Target: ≥ 85%
  • Measured: Monthly

• Cost variance on assigned projects against approved budget
  • Target: Within ± 10%
  • Measured: Monthly

• Assigned projects with a current charter, baseline plan, and live risk and issue registers; portfolio status report issued complete and on cadence
  • Target: 100%
  • Measured: Monthly

• Material risks and issues escalated before they materialize, with a recommended response
  • Target:100%
  • Measured: Continuous

• Framework, AI toolkit, responsible-AI standard, and roadmap deliverables accepted by the agreed dates
  • Target: 100%
  • Measured: Per Milestone

• ITS staff trained and actively using the AI-enabled delivery assets handed over
  • Target: Per enablement plan
  • Measured: Quarterly

• Completed projects formally closed with handover, benefits confirmation, and lessons learned
  • Target: 100%
  • Measured: Per Closure

• Sponsor and stakeholder satisfaction with project management on assigned projects
  • Target: ≥ 4 of 5
  • Measured: Quarterly

Targets will be confirmed during the first month against the baseline established in the portfolio assessment. Where a project is inherited mid-flight with an unrealistic baseline, re-baselining through approved change control shall not be counted as a schedule failure.

7. Work Schedule & Conditions

Position: IT Project Manager Consultant

Work type / Duty Station: Full-time consultancy; remote (off-site), with core hours overlapping Washington, D.C. business hours. Occasional mission travel may be required, subject to prior approval.

Duration: 6 months, extension subject to satisfactory performance, with a formal review at month three and availability of funds

Position Type: Band B of International PAHO Consultant (IPC-Band B)

Reporting To: Director, Information Technology Services

Remuneration: Daily rate $300

Confidentiality & IP: All PAHO project, procurement, personnel, and Member State information shall be treated as confidential, in compliance with PAHO information security, data protection, and AI governance policies. All deliverables, templates, prompt libraries, agent and automation configurations, and work products are the property of PAHO.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

• This vacancy notice may be used to identify candidates for other similar consultancies at the same level.
• Successful candidates will be placed on the roster and subsequently may be selected for consultancy assignments falling in this area of work or for similar requirements/tasks/deliverables. Inclusion in the Roster does not guarantee selection for a consultant contract. There is no commitment on either side.
• Only candidates under serious consideration will be contacted.
• All applicants are required to complete an on-line profile to be considered for this consultancy. For assessment of your application, please ensure that your profile in the PAHO Career page is updated; all experience records are entered with elaboration on tasks performed at the time. Kindly note that CV/PHFs inserted via LinkedIn are no accessible.
• A written test may be used as a form of screening.
• If your candidature is retained for interview, you will be required to provide, in advance, a scanned copy of the degree(s)/diploma(s)/certificate(s) required for this position. PAHO/WHO only considers higher educational qualifications obtained from an institution accredited/recognized in the World Higher Education Database (WHED), a list updated by the International Association of Universities (IAU)/United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The list can be accessed through the link: http://www.whed.net/. PAHO will also use the databases of the Council for Higher Education Accreditation http://www.chea.org/search/default.asp and College Navigator, found on the website of the National Centre for Educational Statistics, https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator to support the validation process. Some professional certificates may not appear in the WHED and will require individual review.
• Any appointment/extension of appointment is subject to PAHO/WHO Regulations, and e-Manual.
• For information on PAHO please visit: http://www.paho.org
• PAHO/WHO is committed to providing a respectful and supportive workplace for all personnel .
• PAHO is an ethical organization that maintains high standards of integrity and accountability. People joining PAHO are required to maintain these standards both in their professional work and personal activities.
• PAHO also promotes a work environment that is free from harassment, sexual harassment, discrimination, and other types of abusive behavior. PAHO conducts background checks and will not hire anyone who has a substantiated history of abusive conduct.
• PAHO personnel interact frequently with people in the communities we serve. To protect these people, PAHO has zero tolerance for sexual exploitation and abuse. People who commit serious wrongdoings will be terminated and may also face criminal prosecution.
• PAHO/WHO has a smoke-free environment and does not recruit smokers or users of any form of tobacco.
• Applications from women and from nationals of non and underrepresented Member States are particularly encouraged.
• Consultants shall perform the work as independent contractors in a personal capacity, and not as a representative of any entity or authority. The execution of the work under a consultant contract does not create an employer/employee relationship between PAHO and the Consultant.
• PAHO/WHO shall have no responsibility whatsoever for any taxes, duties, social security contributions or other contributions payable by the Consultant. The Consultant shall be solely responsible for withholding and paying any taxes, duties, social security contributions and any other contributions which are applicable to the Consultant in each location/jurisdiction in which the work hereunder is performed, and the Consultant shall not be entitled to any reimbursement thereof by PAHO/WHO.