Workplace: Manchester, Hybrid working - 2 days in the office

The Role

We are recruiting for a PMO Lead to join our Finance CI Team; this is a small, high-performing team with responsibility for delivering strategic projects across Finance. We work with teams from all across Finance, driving the delivery of projects.

This role will be embedded in Group Finance and will focus on supporting the project team and senior stakeholders in the delivery of projects to simplify and standardise our systems and processes whilst enhancing our controls environment, through effective planning, monitoring and control of project activities.

The PMO is responsible for supporting these projects by providing administrative support, tracking the project's progress, monitoring KPIs and ensuring programme documentation is up to date. Reporting to the Head of Finance CI, the PMO will also work closely with the workstream leads (WSLs) to support the portfolio of projects and programmes and ensure they are delivered on time, within budget, and delivering business value.

Key responsibilities

• Support the Head of Finance CI by providing an up-to-date status of all FInance CI Projects for various stakeholders including project teams, senior management and for use in governance forums
• Proactively track key milestones, dependencies and critical paths by actively seeking updates, identifying and escalating potential delays impacting deliverables
• Manage project risk and issue logs, proactively seeking updates from WSLs and ensuring timely escalation of critical items to relevant stakeholders
• Support in monitoring project progress and status reporting, coordinating WSLs’ status report updates
• Maintain the programme documentation including governance structure, meetings cadence, trackers, etc.
• Provide administrative support to the projects, including scheduling meetings, preparing agendas, documenting decisions and noting and proactively following-up on actions
• Support in maintaining the high level project plans
• Support in monitoring project KPIs and analysing data, providing insights to support decision making
• Support the implementation of project management tools and software
• Support the development of project budgets where appropriate, working with the Head of Finance CI and relevant finance business partner
• Contribute to the continuous improvement of project management processes and procedures, especially those impacting financial controls and reporting

Skills you’ll need (minimum criteria)

• Experience with project management tools and software especially Jira
• Understanding of project management methodologies (e.g. Agile, Waterfall)
• Demonstrable experience working on finance-related projects (eg. ERP implementations, finance system upgrades, finance transformation) is preferable
• Proficient in Google suite

Other things we’re looking for (key criteria)

• Great communicator with an ability to build and influence relationships
• Can work as part of a team as well ability to work independently, takes initiative
• Excellent attention to detail
• Able to work under pressure, to tight deadlines, and can manage multiple tasks, prioritise effectively