Portfolio Account Manager

About Us

The Department for Business and Trade (DBT) is the department for economic growth. We are a newly formed department that brings together Britain’s world-class business expertise with trade policy, negotiations and promotion. We support businesses to invest, grow and export, creating jobs and opportunities across the country.

It’s an exciting time to join the Department. Since we were established in February this year, we've been working at pace to deliver on the Department’s objectives. As part of this delivery, the Department has a £35bn portfolio of over 30 major projects/ programmes. This includes digital transformation programmes, major investment projects and grant schemes into key UK business sectors.

Our Team

We are looking for a Portfolio Account Manager to play a vital part in supporting some of these important and exciting projects. This role sits within the Change Portfolio Office as part of the Project Delivery and Change Directorate (PD&C).

The team operates as a central project delivery and change management function with strategic oversight of DBT’s major projects and project delivery best practice.

The Change Portfolio Office:

• Improve the Department’s project delivery oversight, to provide a holistic view of change across DBT and key insight to inform senior decision making.
• Increase our project delivery capability and capacity, by supporting delivery of those major initiatives ensuring they are set up for success and controlled.
• Work with governance and assurance to strengthen DBT’s investment decisions, ensuring DBT is investing in the right change initiatives.

Our team support the portfolio of projects as named Account Managers. We serve as subject matter experts, critical friends and named points of contacts to help projects to deliver their agreed benefits. We ensure projects are set up for success and have plans, risks logs and governance arrangements in place.

As a Portfolio Account Manager, you will be allocated a number of major change initiatives to support. You will engage regularly with the projects to support delivery, identify cross-cutting themes and escalate challenges. The team also lead a number of core functions for the Portfolio including RAID management, planning, project delivery frameworks and reporting.

You will lead on reporting and frameworks and run the regular reporting cycle to provide insight, information and support that strengthens portfolio oversight and enables senior management to make effective decisions across the portfolio.

As a Portfolio Account Manager, the successful candidate will be responsible for:

• Account Management - Acting as named point of contact to support your projects to deliver in line with departmental strategic objectives. This will include regular engagement with Project Managers, Programme Directors and attending Project Boards.
• Project Support - Support projects to ensure they are set up and running effectively through providing specialist delivery advise throughout the project life-cycle.  
• Team Leadership/ Line Management – Actively lead your team to deliver successfully, line management of 2 SEOs.
• Project Delivery Best Practice - Drive effective adoption and implementation of project delivery good practice across the portfolio, in partnership with our Portfolio Governance and Assurance team.
• Stakeholder Engagement – Build and maintain good working relationships with key stakeholders, including programmes, corporate functions, the IPA, other government departments, to support the aims and vision of the Portfolio Office.
• Portfolio Insight– Work together with colleagues in Planning and RAID to coordinate and provide data driven insights on the shape and performance of the portfolio. Lead the bimonthly reporting process for DBT’s major programmes portfolio. This includes providing analysis of the bi-monthly returns and producing an executive summary for the portfolio performance pack.
• Portfolio Initiation- Work closely with business areas to identify and categorise new projects for a decision on entry to the portfolio and provide regular updates on the pipeline to the senior board.  
• Project Frameworks - Work with Head of Portfolio Office to establish and implement a clear Portfolio Framework. Support your team to develop documentation for the Project Delivery Portal, a central repository of project standards and guidance for the DBT project delivery community.  
• Risk and Issues Management – Support projects to set up effective RAID management, analyse risks and issues from across the portfolio and identify cross-cutting themes and challenges.
• Planning - Support projects to set up effective planning practices, collate and analyse high-level plans from across the portfolio to provide key insight to senior management.

The post holder is required to work in a flexible way and undertake any other duties reasonably requested by line management which are commensurate with the grade and level of responsibility of this post.