Business Change Manager

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Job Description

This role is within the News UK Finance team. It is a hybrid working model with your home base being either our London Head Office or our Peterborough Office with travel between the two. There will also be occasional visits to our Newsprinter sites across England and Scotland. Interaction will also be with people in other Finance teams across the globe, including Dow Jones and News Australia.

Your role: This role is a once in a career opportunity to play a role on a transformational Finance Systems project. News UK is in the process of investing in and transforming our Finance Systems landscape. We will not only be moving our core ERP system to S/4 HANA, but also implementing new additional systems including those for Procurement, Contingent Workforce and various other activities.

As a Business Change Manager, you will work with other Business Change Managers to deliver the programme's change management agenda, embedding this transformational change into News UK, and critically taking News UK colleagues on this important journey.

You will support the Change and Communication Programme Lead in developing and managing the programme change strategy, change impact assessments and action plans, stakeholder analysis and engagement approaches, communication planning and delivery, and assessing business readiness to support the go/no go decision from a people readiness perspective, to successfully deliver the change.

Day to day you will:

• Building strong relationships with key impacted stakeholders and audiences. Developing, and implementing change and engagement strategies to support these audiences with adopting new ways of working and drive advocacy for the programme across News UK.
• Producing, delivering, and day to day monitoring of detailed stakeholder engagement and communications plans for key audiences, obtaining regular feedback from stakeholders on critical project milestones.
• Working collaboratively with the wider project team to recruit change agents and build and foster a business wide change network within the News UK business, creating a self-supporting network to educate and inform users of the new systems and processes.
• Conducting detailed business change impact assessments to understand the scale and nature of the change to be able to develop appropriate approaches and mitigations to drive adoption of change and minimise disruption during transition. Maintaining business impact assessment register, and producing regular business impact assessment reports.
• Developing and delivering change mitigation action plans and strategic change interventions and assessing effectiveness of change mitigation activities.
• Conducting role to position mapping to ensure key audiences have the correct access to be able to adopt new systems and minimise disruption during transition.
• Understanding business communication needs of key business audiences, working with the communications team to develop communication plans, support the production of communication materials, and delivery of communications, ensuring business change impacts are mitigated and the right messages are delivered to the right audiences at the right time.
• Understanding business training needs of key impacted audiences and working with the training team ensure business change impacts are appropriately trained and business training needs are suitably met.
• Assessing the readiness for change of the business and advising on transition activities to embed the change within the business.
• Plan, track and manage benefit delivery across key affected business functions, underpinned by the necessary supporting data. This includes owning solution and process adoption, which is a key performance indicator for the programme.
• Assisting the Deployment Lead in the provision of transition support and playing a central supporting role during hypercare and planning for business continuity.
• Identify, assess, report and escalate risks, dependencies and issues associated with proposed changes, to minimise impact on services and support successful implementation of changes.
• Work closely with key programme colleagues such as the Finance Transformation Programme Manager, and Business, Process and Technical Leads, to understand any further requirements of the business change and communications function.
• Provide the necessary advice, education, and coaching to the business and other stakeholders regarding the proper implementation of a Change Management methodology.
• Coordinate, where required, with other projects and programmes in News UK that may have an impact on the programme and manage those impacts from a change perspective.

What we are looking for from you:

• Prior experience of supporting and leading change management in complex Finance systems transformation programmes. Experience in some or all of the following: S/4 HANA, Record to Report processes (FI, CO, AP, Tax) Order to Cash processes. Logistics process (MRP, Distribution), Acquire to Retire and project accounting.
• Strong experience of Change Management experience across a full change lifecycle on complex multi-workstream transformational programmes.
• Relevant change management qualification, preferably PROSCI.
• Experience of working hand-in-glove with a System Implementation (SI) Partner to successfully deliver a programme of change.
• Comfortable managing or leading a team of change analysts in a complex change programme.
• Extensive experience of conducting detailed change impact assessments across multiple workstreams, processes, systems and business functions.
• Experience of developing and delivering plans for change activities and ensuring they are integrated into the programme and other related change activities.
• Excellent understanding of communication and training practices and has designed and developed materials and delivered in line with planned dates.
• Experience in helping the impacted business areas through deployment and change to drive adoption and benefits realisation.
• Ability to build and maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders at all levels of the business and across the programme team.
• Be able to cut through complexity and get to the 'so what?', enabling effective communication to senior leadership and providing clear, polished, and concise outputs

Behaviours required:

• Be extremely proactive and be prepared to 'lean into' challenges and challenging situations when they arise. Be curious; pre-empt issues, challenge, ask the right questions and propose solutions rather than wait for questions.
• Excellent communication skills, ability to simplify complex information to suit the audience.
• Willingness to go above and beyond to support the business, building your knowledge and your network to enable this.
• Calmness under pressure and an expert ability in problem solving under ambiguity and ability to flex and and adopt to the needs of the programme.
• Ability to handle multiple tasks simultaneously with effective time management and prioritisation.
• Be a great team player and be happy to get stuck-in to support others - the Finance Transformation Programme is a very supportive and collaborative team - we would like anyone who joins us to build on this culture.

We are News UK: One of the leading media businesses in the UK and Ireland. Our newsbrands include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Sun on Sunday and The TLS. Our national broadcast brands include talkSPORT, Times Radio, TalkTV and Virgin Radio UK, and we have market-leading local radio stations across Ireland. Our world-famous brands provide news, analysis, opinion and entertainment to almost 40 million people each month. Spanning print and pixel, audio and video, events and experiences, our multiplatform brands are home to a plurality of opinion, representing the diverse communities we serve. News UK is wholly owned by News Corp.

Life at News

Driven by passion, guided by principles and acting with purpose. We represent, reflect and reach the nation, telling the stories that matter. We inform our audiences so that they can make decisions based on trusted information.

To do this, we believe our employees must represent different backgrounds, perspectives and experiences. We strive to maximise and encourage every individual's potential and ensure everyone feels valued. We support this through our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Strategy, which focuses on three main priorities - attracting talent from a wider, more representative pool, developing equity programmes to drive better representation in our leadership, and ensuring diversity and inclusivity in our workforce as well as the journalism and content we produce. We also currently have 12 employee led networks and groups that support our strategy and connect like minded employees socially.

Benefits

Some of our benefits include:

• Maternity leave up to 18 weeks full basic salary & paternity leave up to 2 weeks
• Wide range of training available, plus full LinkedIn Learning access
• Private medical insurance including coverage for pre-existing conditions
• Discounted gym memberships , free ClassPass at Home, weekly virtual yoga classes
• 'Bikes for Work' and 'Electric Car' scheme
• Up to 60% discount on Harper Collins books
• Access to exclusive events and competitions with exciting brands such as talkSPORT, Virgin Radio UK & The Times. Weekly virtual panel chats with top journalists and celebrities
• Access to wellbeing benefits such as EAP, physio/massage and counselling
• A generous pension scheme with employer contributions of up to 5%
• 25 days holiday , plus bank holidays and up to 4 volunteering days per year

We want to ensure that everyone we meet has the opportunity to perform to their best when applying for a role. Please let us know, at any stage, whether you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, and we will do our best to accommodate.