Research Project Manager

The University of Sheffield is a remarkable place to work. Our people are at the heart of everything we do. Their diverse backgrounds, abilities and beliefs make Sheffield a world-class university. We offer a fantastic range of benefits including a highly competitive annual leave entitlement, a generous pensions scheme, flexible working opportunities, a commitment to your development and wellbeing, a wide range of retail discounts, and much more.

Data Connect is a service within the Research and Innovation IT team in the University’s IT Department. It is focused on supporting researchers to get access to health and social care data for research projects. It is a strategically important service in the University that enables research that will directly impact on the quality and length of people's lives.

We are seeking a Research Project Manager to support the Data Connect team, ensuring seamless project execution from planning to delivery. You will work closely with the Senior Research Project Manager and Data Technical Lead whilst acting as a key point of contact for Principal Investigators and lead researchers, guiding projects from inception to completion.

In this pivotal role, you will contribute to the full project lifecycle, proactively identifying and addressing obstacles to optimise team efficiency. Your responsibilities will encompass planning, scheduling, and delivering engagement, governance, and data management activities. You will facilitate agile workflows, including daily stand-ups, backlog refinement, sprint planning, and retrospectives, to drive continuous improvement.

The Research Project Manager will work closely with other team members, particularly the Senior Research Project Manager, communicating openly about the work pipeline and opportunities, progress on current projects, highlighting risks and issues and collaborating to resolve them. They will communicate clearly with Data Connect service users to set project scope, timelines and delivery expectations.

Main Duties And Responsibilities

• Working with researchers to define project workflows, project scopes and timelines and ensuring alignment with stakeholder expectations.
• Providing support to a range of programmes, including the Yorkshire & Humber Secure Data Environment.
• Working with the Data Connect team to break down defined research projects into manageable tasks and create sprint plans.
• Contributing to the improvement of service design, by providing feedback and insights based on user interactions and project experiences.
• Maintaining and optimizing JIRA board workflows, ensuring efficient project tracking and task management.
• Working closely with the Senior Research Project Manager to manage team capacity and resource allocation across all active projects.
• Facilitating effective communication among team members, ensuring clear and consistent information flow.
• Creating and maintaining comprehensive project documentation, including project plans, reports, and meeting minutes.
• Identifying and implementing process improvements, streamlining workflows and increasing efficiency.
• Implementing and facilitating agile methodologies, including sprints, stand-ups, and retrospectives.
• Collaborating with the Data Management team to oversee the collection, storage, and analysis of research data, and assisting in resolving workstream obstacles.
• Carrying out other duties, commensurate with the grade and remit of the post.

As a member of the Research and Innovation team with IT Services, the role will also require engagement with activities to share skills, knowledge and experience more widely to improve how we work together to meet the strategic objective of the University as a whole.

Person Specification

Our diverse community of staff and students recognises the unique abilities, backgrounds, and beliefs of all. We foster a culture where everyone feels they belong and is respected. Even if your past experience doesn’t match perfectly with this role's criteria, your contribution is valuable, and we encourage you to apply. Please ensure that you reference the application criteria in the application statement when you apply.

Essential criteria

• Demonstrable expertise in directly managing a portfolio of projects of various sizes, including work scheduling and planning.
• Good understanding of the use of modern techniques and tools for collaborative team working and product delivery (e.g. Kanban/SCRUM, Jira, Git/Github).
• Knowledge of and ability to identify, track, report and mitigate project risks and issues appropriately.
• Ability to communicate clearly and confidently with stakeholders including senior researchers and data providers.
• Demonstrable capability to organise requests for the team’s time against challenging deadlines into a coherent schedule.
• An enabling, supportive and collaborative approach to team working.

Desirable criteria

• Experience of managing technical teams with expertise to organise their work and continuously improve their working processes.
• Experience of working with sensitive health data, preferably with exposure to data governance process, data standards, and working within trusted research environments (TREs) and/or secure data environments (SDEs).

Further Information

Grade: 7
Salary: £38,249-£46,735 per annum
Work arrangement: Full-time
Duration: 1x fixed-term until 31 March 2026; 1x fixed-term until 30 April 2027
Line manager: Senior Research Project Manager
Direct reports: (Junior) Project Managers

For informal enquiries about this job contact Rosie Gough, Senior Research Project Manager: on r.e.gough@sheffield.ac.uk

Next steps in the recruitment process: It is anticipated that the selection process will consist of an interview and technical test. We plan to let candidates know if they have progressed to the selection stage at least a week before interviews. If you need any support, equipment or adjustments to enable you to participate in any element of the recruitment process you can contact it-services-recruitment@sheffield.ac.uk.

We are a Disability Confident Employer. If you have a disability and meet the essential criteria for this job you will be invited to take part in the next stage of the selection process.

A basic DBS check will be needed for this role. Possession of a criminal record is not an automatic bar to employment at the University of Sheffield. We recognise the value of steady employment in the rehabilitation process and examine each case in its own right.

We are a research university with a global reputation for excellence. Our ideas and expertise change the world for the better, making a real difference to society.