Portfolio Manager Technology

**Role: Portfolio Manager**

**Location: Reigate**

**Salary: Competative**

Our client is a specialist UK financial services group focusing on attractive segments of the UK retirement income market but guess what, they're not your traditional financial services company and they're not just looking for traditional financial servicespeople.
Our client needs agile operators, who can quickly find solutions and are committed to doing the right thing for their customers. To fulfil our clients purpose to help people achieve a better later life.
In 2021 our client was named as one of the?UK's?100?Best Large Companies to work for and accredited as a 2 star organisation, representing outstanding levels of engagement. Alongside these they were also recognised as one of the Financial Services' 30 BestCompanies to Work For, London's 75 Best Large Companies to Work For, South East's 100 Best Companies to Work For and Northern Ireland's 10 Best Companies to Work For.
Our client is extremely proud to have achieved this against the backdrop of the pandemic and the many challenges it posed to its colleagues and customers.
**The Role**
As a vital member of the Value Stream leadership team, the Programme Manager will enable and drive the delivery of real business value by the Value Stream. To do this will include facilitation, direction and support of the Value Stream teams in both Businessand Technology change, stakeholder engagement and the drive for continuous improvement.
You will identify and manage the opportunities and challenges of aligning delivery efforts with business priorities across a complex range of domains and have line management responsibilities with responsibility for coaching and developing both direct reportsand other members of the function.
**The principal responsibilities**:

- Manage and optimise the flow of value through the Value Stream using appropriate tools and techniques;
- Working with Value Stream Product Managers to agree on Value Stream delivery objectives and publish them for visibility and transparency;
- Establish and communicate Value Stream planning events, outcomes and delivery iterations that include realistic and pragmatic plans and what is required to succeed;
- Facilitate and ensure Value Stream planning readiness by working closely with the Value Stream Product Manager and other key stakeholders to understand objectives, roadmaps and backlogs;
- Enable and facilitate the tracking of the execution of features and capabilities against objectives and goals;
- Working with other Programme Managers, facilitate periodic synchronisation and alignment of delivery roadmaps and increments to identify and manage interdependencies;
- Support the Product Manager with decision making by facilitating effective estimation by technology and business teams of prioritised work;
- Identify and support the management of risks and dependencies and escalate where they cannot be resolved or are outside of the organisation's appetite for risk;
- Encourage collaboration between teams inside the Value Stream and between Value Streams and the wider business;
- Understand and ensure adherence to agreed quality standards, governance and guardrails including Value Stream expenditure; ensuring that material deviations are transparent, visible and accepted;
- Drive and enable continuous improvement to help the Value Stream improve over time;
- Establish, foster and maintain an environment and organisation structure to enable delivery excellence;
- Understand and make visible the progress against objectives and make interventions to manage impediments where necessary;
- Understand and manage the Value Stream's capacity and capability and communicate this clearly;
- Develop, measure and respond to metrics and key results in a timely manner - ensuring they are transparent and visible to value stream stakeholders;
- Lead the Delivery Management team within the Value Stream and occasionally beyond (direct line management).

**Skills and Experience Required**:

- Impartial - Reflects a true delivery picture, does not attempt to communicate only good news or what people want to hear and avoids expressing personal views.
- Proactive - Looks ahead for potential problems and takes preventative or mitigating action in advance. Does not get caught in permanent 'reactive' mode.
- Managing stakeholder relationships - Engages and manages stakeholders effectively, resolving issues and understanding drivers/needs.
- Managing 3rd party suppliers.
- Self-Drive/resilience - Responds to challenging priorities with a sense of urgency and pace. Bounces back from disappointments with renewed determination.
- Ability to learn new skills quickly and effectively.
- Ability to work in an uncertain changing environment.
- Strong experience (at least 5 years) of delivery management in an agile, multi-disciplined and commercial environment, in roles across Business and IT.
- Strong stakeholder, negotiation and conflict management skills.
- Broad knowledge and experience of different delivery methodologies such as Agile, Waterfall, Scrum, Kanban
- Good relationship management skills (to Director Level).
- Good delivery management experience in multi-functional projects.
- Good experience of Agile and Lean practices preferably SAFe.
- Good awareness of the control environment within a financial services organisation.
- Good awareness and understanding of Conduct Risk.