Role Title: Strategy and Planning COO
Duration: contract to run until 28/11/2025
Location: Sheffield, 3 days onsite 2 days remote
Rate: up to £600 p/d Umbrella inside IR35 with flexibility
Role purpose / summary
Within our Chief Technology Office, the COO function supports the evolving needs of the CTO organisation through expert financial, business and resource management. Within COO, the change portfolio management function supports the alignment of CTO strategic priorities to execution by:
- Enabling decentralised delivery, minimising dependencies, and maximising collaboration across CTO Areas
- Managing demand more effectively, ensuring we are working towards the right strategic priorities.
- Supporting alignment of funding and capacity to drive delivery of our strategic outcomes and OKRs.
- Delivering streamlined governance and reporting through a simplified operating model
- We are currently seeking an experienced professional to join our Change Portfolio team in the role of Portfolio Strategy and Planning Lead
The role will report to the Head of CTO Change Portfolio Management and work closely with the CTO Transformation and Change Leads and wider teams/stakeholders to deliver common objectives.
Key Skills/ requirements
- Responsible for the overall delivery of strategic portfolio outcomes supporting business vision and purpose through complex and global change portfolios.
- Owns CTO portfolio strategy and ensures organisational strategic requirements and priorities are understood, documented and are supported by technology architecture roadmaps and vendor strategy.
- Ownership and delivery of strategic planning cycles across change portfolios to ensure financial investment decisions supports CTO long term strategy, risk appetite and aligns to the client's strategy and future business / customer needs.
- Development of business cases and benefit validation to support transformation, strategic initiatives and to support fast paced business responses to emerging threats and opportunities
- Develop and drive regular engagement with senior stakeholders at C-suite and director level, to influence and deliver CTO vision and strategy
- Support the management of risks across CTO by ensuring portfolio risks, issues and dependencies are managed effectively and senior stakeholders are informed / updated where appropriate
- Own and deliver portfolio level reporting associated with strategy and planning
- The role includes supporting leadership development within the CTO Change portfolio management team
- Supporting management of portfolio budgets to help CTO meet its annual operating plan of approx. $2bn P&L across 65 countries, including identification and delivery of savings opportunities across portfolios as required.
- Ensuring that CTO is able to meet committed outcomes by working with engineering teams to align supply to meet forecasted demand pipelines
- Ensure CTO programmes are well interlocked with other programmes within the client's Technology and dependencies are well understood and managed
Essential Skillset/Experience:
- 8 years plus strategic portfolio management or relevant experience, ideally within Financial Services technology functions and working with C-level executives
- Strong emotional intelligence and leadership: Navigate organisational complexities, foster a positive work culture, and lead teams effectively.
- Proven experience of large-scale transformation
- Knowledge of portfolio management principles and practices
- Excellent communication/presentation skills required
- Proven ability to articulate complex issues concisely, suitable for all levels across the client's group
- Pro-active problem solving skills, able to work to under pressure to challenging timescales and deliver at pace
- Strong stakeholder management capability and excellent communication at all levels of seniority
- Detailed understanding of the financial & strategy planning
- Experience working with annual operations plans and multi-million dollar global programs and initiatives
- Excellent commercial awareness and proven ability to develop multi-year business cases worth over $100m
- Sound knowledge and understanding of the infrastructure technology landscape and industry
- Experience of working in a diverse global team
- Flexible and adaptable to changing activities, schedules, workloads and priorities that are potentially highly restricted in nature, unpredictable, wide ranging, complex and time sensitive requires the simultaneous handling of a broad range of issues
- Proven leadership & strong teamwork skills, seeking to influence within and outside of the team and successfully encourage teams to work together
- Experience of continuous improvement
All profiles will be reviewed against the required skills and experience. Due to the high number of applications we will only be able to respond to successful applicants in the first instance. We thank you for your interest and the time taken to apply!