Right across infrastructure, there’s a requirement to not only maintain, but also renew and reimagine. Whatever stage you’re at in your career, with us you’ll have an opportunity to grow and develop. Delivering essential infrastructure services for life, while being safety first, and client and customer centric in a friendly, fun and respectful environment where you are encouraged to thrive.
Where you'll be working?
The Head of Portfolio Management and PMO is a senior leader within the Strategic Portfolio Management Office, responsible for establishing, leading, and continuously improving the delivery frameworks, governance, standards, and assurance that underpin successful project and programme delivery across the change portfolio. They are also accountable for ensuring that change initiatives are strategically aligned, properly resourced, and sequenced to maximise organisational capacity.
They work closely with programme and project leadership and functional leaders to strengthen organisational delivery capability and enable informed decision making. A commercially astute and proactive technology leader, they bring deep experience in managing complex portfolios and are confident engaging with senior stakeholders.
What you'll bring?
- Set and maintain a strategy-aligned portfolio roadmap, overseeing performance, risks, KPIs and governance.
- Manage investment planning, budgeting, value-based prioritisation and funding decisions, partnering with executives, SPMO leadership, delivery teams, finance, technology and risk teams.
- Co-ordinate cross-programme sequencing and interdependencies.
- Lead the PMO as a centre of excellence for governance, standards, and best practice; develop a high‑performing PMO team.
- Design and maintain scalable governance, stage gates, assurance, and compliance controls.
- Establish and embed delivery frameworks, templates, and methodologies (waterfall, Agile, hybrid).
- Oversee quality assurance, health checks, audits, and performance reporting; escalate systemic risks.
- Drive continuous improvement, maturity uplift, lessons learned, and communities of practice.
- Support and coach project/programme managers on planning, risk, roles, and delivery expectations.
- Provide portfolio‑level reporting, insights, dashboards, and data‑driven decision support.
- Demonstrate strategic, enabling, collaborative, data‑driven, capability‑building, and resilient leadership.
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Essential skills & experience
- Proven experience leading PMO functions within complex, enterprise environments, with accountability for portfolio governance, standards, and delivery performance.
- Strong experience designing and implementing portfolio governance, reporting, and decision-making frameworks that drive transparency and control without hindering pace.
- Extensive experience leading portfolio management, prioritisation, investment decisions, and strategic alignment. Proven capability in demand shaping, planning, optimisation, and benefits realisation within large transformations.
- Experience in defining, tracking and realising benefits tied to strategic outcomes.
- Deep understanding of portfolio risks, interdependencies, and constraints with proactive mitigation.
- Track record of successfully enabling large-scale transformation programmes, ensuring alignment between strategy, investment, and execution.
- Demonstrated ability to work across business units, technology, finance, and governance functions to deliver integrated portfolio outcomes.
- Influences organisational adoption of consistent delivery practices.
- Provides guidance and assurance across projects and programmes.
- Strong track record in delivery assurance, quality control, and reporting.
- Demonstrated ability to influence senior stakeholders and drive adoption of standards.
- Embeds best practices and promotes consistency.
Desirable
- Educated to degree level in a relevant discipline (e.g., IT, Business, Management, Engineering) or equivalent professional experience.
- Relevant professional certifications such as APM, PMP, PRINCE2, MSP, AgilePM, SAFe.
- Experience with Agile delivery frameworks (e.g., SAFe, Scrum at scale).
- Experienced in using project and programme management tools (e.g. MS Project, Azure DevOps) to track delivery, plan resources and manage budgets.
- Experience working within SFIA-aligned organisations or capability frameworks
- Familiarity with portfolio and PMO tooling (e.g., Clarity, Planview, ServiceNow, Jira Align).
What’s in it for you?
We offer a range of benefits designed to support your life in and out of work, some of which include;
- Matched or contributory pension scheme
- Online GP service, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year
- Employee assistance programme
- My Rewards portal, access to 1000’s of retail discounts
- Life assurance
- Cycle to work, salary finance and give as you earn schemes
- Enhanced maternity, paternity leave and adoption leave
- Reward and recognition scheme
In addition, this role offers;
- Company car or allowance and fuel card with a range of EV and hybrid vehicles to choose from
- My Car Choice our salary sacrifice EV/ Hybrid car scheme
- Private health care and health care cash plan for you and your family
- Discretionary bonus scheme
- 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays
- Recommend a friend – get rewarded for introducing people to us!
About us
We want to be an employer of choice and a great place to work, attracting diverse and talented people, who join us and make a difference. We’re one of the Top 100 UK companies actively supporting and recruiting veterans. Our ENABLE inclusion networks bring together people who have a shared passion, to help create an environment where everyone belongs.
Our values help to shape our culture and how we work with one another. We recruit with these values in mind, to ensure your aspirations, and ways of working, align with ours.
- We’re responsible and go further for our people, clients, communities and the planet
- We’re open and seek new and better ways of exceeding expectations
- We’re together and as one team; the whole is greater than the sum of the parts
- We’re ambitious and embrace opportunity, to lead essential infrastructure services for life
Whether you’re a trainee, apprentice or graduate, or progressing through your career, our people benefit from industry recognised programmes, training and development.
It’s an exceptional time to be a part of M Group.
Please note: Occasionally, job adverts might be closed before the stated closing date. Do apply as soon as possible to ensure your application is considered.
For certain roles, successful candidates will be subject to 3rd party background checks as part of the hiring process. Some roles require drug and alcohol testing as part of induction and onboarding.
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