My client is a Large Insurance company looking for a IT Project / Portfolio Manager on a permanent basis.
Your role is a blend of strategic and tactical change plus programme/project delivery oversight and needs strong people management and leadership skills (managing circa 5 direct IT Delivery Manager and Business Analyst reports), stakeholder management and a demonstrable track record in delivering change in legacy environments.
You will have extensive experience of delivering a wide range of complex projects and programmes and of managing at portfolio level to deliver change and achieve stated business and IT benefits. You will always need to ensure that IT Portfolio initiatives are aligned to the IT Strategy Road map. You are the IT Change Lead for IT-led changes, with an obligation to ensure that IT Portfolio reporting is fed into the IT balanced scorecard. However, your responsibility extends to the technology delivery on Business-Change led projects as well, which involves participating on the Portfolio Review Board (PRB) and applying an enterprise-wide PMO approach.
Core Responsibilities
- Governance - as the IT Change Lead, setting up and applying PMO processes for your IT projects (including support training and development specific to program delivery process), and input & alignment to the wider TM project & programme governance processes set up (e.g., PRB, the new BDA etc.)
- Reporting of the IT portfolio under your remit - including input to the balanced scorecard and impacts on the IT strategy roadmap as defined by the CIO, and communicating project status and issues
- Resourcing, People & Leadership: you will manage a team of IT delivery managers and analysts who are focussed on the delivery of your IT-led change projects. Some may be 3rd party partners, so managing experience of 3rd party reports is essential. You will lead and mentor your reports
- Prioritising, planning and scheduling your portfolio, as you consider the sequencing & timing within your projects and demand management needs that they have, detecting inter-dependencies of these with the product and component service teams working around them
- Risk and Issue Management: it will be your responsibility to identify, manage and develop mitigations to project risks and issues that emerge.
- Stakeholder Management: IT projects operate alongside product teams, business change projects and a wider TM-wide governance framework, so building and maintaining productive relationships with several key stakeholders is crucial.
- Budget and Benefits Management: You will forecast, monitor and manage budgets vs expenditure within your projects at a high level with delegation to your Delivery Managers. At the same time, the benefits and business case are documents you must regularly hold them to account against.
- Building of best practice IT Portfolio: as your team forms the nucleus of best practices in the areas of IT project management and IT portfolio management; tailored to the needs of the program team and stakeholders. Actively participating in the Delivery management community, sharing and re-applying skills and knowledge and bringing in best practice. The goal is consistency as well as efficiencies that this brings.
- Line-manage the IT Delivery Managers and analysts under your remit
- Verify all solutions/products are built to an appropriate level of quality for the stage
- Take a consistent and ongoing approach to planning, forecasting, estimating, managing uncertainty, metrics and measurements, contingency planning and creating a road map
- Communicate plans, planning assumptions and progress to a range of stakeholders
- Work with the IT Leadership team to agree the IT Portfolio scope annually and ongoing and input to annual budget submissions
Requirements:
- 10+ years combined IT experience in project, program and portfolio management
- Proven experience in agile project delivery using a recognised agile method
- Successfully managed a large portfolio with multiple stakeholders
- Understanding business priorities, supporting business change and managing successful business partnerships
Eames Consulting is acting as an Employment Agency in relation to this vacancy.
