Programme Manager

The Government People Group exists to work with departments, professions, and functions to build a modern, effective Civil Service.

We support the government workforce with the right skills and capability. We are working with leaders to get the right people in the right jobs, with the right skills and continuous learning to excel in their roles.

We provide leadership, and in turn, create leaders with exceptional line management capability across departments, influencing partners in the wider public sector and beyond. This involves getting our retention and reward strategy right, to nurture specific skills, and create pride and resilience in our workforce.

Our role is also to provide system leadership across central government in pulling together back office services. Collectively, we help support the Cabinet Office’s priority to drive efficiencies, and reforms that will make government work better, to ultimately provide a better service to the public.

Putting the right people, with the right skills, in the right roles is essential to building an effective Civil Service. This role provides a unique opportunity to be part of the transformation currently taking place in the way that the Civil Service recruits people, by supporting the delivery of a future recruitment offer that will harness the power of technology to enable a more efficient and effective recruitment journey.

The Recruitment Transformation team is high profile within the Civil Service, and our work frequently gets referenced and discussed at the highest levels of government including with Permanent Secretaries, Ministers, and in Parliament. Our success will ultimately impact the lives of over a million applicants who apply for our jobs each year, as well as making significant improvements for the half a million civil servants who need to hire new people or find their next role.

The Recruitment Transformation team manages a portfolio of programmes, projects and initiatives, including the ‘Applicant Tracking System Replacement Programme’. This programme is included in the ‘Government Major Projects Portfolio’ (GMPP) and is therefore subject to additional oversight and scrutiny by the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA).

We therefore need an experienced Programme Manager, with strong knowledge and experience of GMPP reporting and governance requirements, to join our team and support the delivery of this important programme while also maintaining oversight of the rest of the portfolio.

You will lead a small team including a Planning Manager and a Risk Manager, and you will be part of a wider team that includes a Benefits Manager and other PMO, Communications, and Strategy roles.

Key responsibilities:

You will be responsible for developing robust approaches to programme management, based on best practice and meeting relevant controls and reporting requirements, including:

• Responsibility for managing the programme plan, and ensuring resourcing is appropriately aligned to deliverables.
• Working with project and work-stream leads to understand and incorporate planning assumptions and dependencies into the overall plan.
• Reporting progress on deliverables, risks, and issues appropriately and effectively.
• Working with the programme Benefits Manager to ensure benefits can be tracked against planned delivery activities.
• Managing the programme board and portfolio board, and ensuring that we comply with all relevant governance and reporting requirements.
• Line management responsibility for a small team that will support the delivery of the work.