PMO Manager

Job Type: Permanent

Location: Edinburgh, Telford or Birmingham

Closing Date: 09/08/26

Salary and benefits: Up to £54,000, discretionary bonus, private medical cover, 38 days annual leave, excellent pension, 12x salary life assurance, career breaks, income protection, 3x volunteering days and much more.

Flexible working: All roles are open to part-time, job-share and other types of flexibility. We will discuss what is important to you and balancing this with business requirements during the recruitment process.

We’re Standard Life, a retirement specialist focused entirely on retirement savings and income. We champion the belief that everyone’s journey to and through retirement can be better, and for more than 200 years, we’ve been helping our customers plan and prepare for their financial futures.

The PMO Manager will provide PMO support at Delivery Centre level to successfully deliver to quality, cost and time targets. This will require analysis, set up and maintenance of suitable project governance and controls in line with the Standard Life Change Management Framework Standards and consistent with the Standard Life project delivery methodology. Partnering closely with their counterpart in Project Management to drive an effective and value add service.

The role will also comprise of managing PMO Analysts, providing guidance and leadership on a day to day basis and managing performance and development. In addition, the PMO Manager will be a key member of the PMO management line, striving for a best in class service with the ability to identify and drive opportunities for improvement on processes, procedures and standards required to operate a robust, cost effective governance and control framework across Standard Life.

Key Responsibilities:

• Facilitate and support project/programme planning, including development of robust project plans, identification of key milestones, dependencies, critical path, risks and assumptions, ensuring planning standards are followed.
• Effective forward planning of own (and teams activities where appropriate) to support delivery, creating visibility of a clear plan, identifying risks and issues for mitigation and re-prioritisation of work with agreement and negotiation with key stakeholders.
• Proactive development and/or co-ordination of key management information packs and reports on an ongoing basis to support the monthly governance cycle.
• Active identification, monitoring and progressing of project/programme/Delivery Centre risks, ensuring the Change Management Framework Standards are adopted for their effective management, as well as challenging accuracy and completeness.
• Identifying appropriate risks for escalation.
• Operate an effective issue management process ensuring issues are identified, recorded in a timely manner with owners and resolution actions in place for and monitored until close out.
• Identifying appropriate issues for escalation.
• Drive effective resource management ensuring resource plans are maintained and resource gaps escalated in a timely manner to drive effective mitigations actions.
• Ensure own team resources are managed effectively through regular supply and demand analysis to cover project demand and maximum recharge to projects.
• Carrying out recruitment activities for own area and supporting other PMO Managers across sites.
• Proactive management costs, through accurate forecasting (where applicable) and review of monthly spend, including payment of invoices (where relevant).
• Challenging stakeholders as required and working closely with Finance Teams to manage risks and offsets effectively.
• Ensure project benefits, both financial and non-financial are captured and tracked throughout the project life cycle.
• Set up and maintain appropriate Documentation/Configuration Management systems following the necessary framework standards.
• Facilitate identification, awareness and monitoring of key dependencies (both internal and external), assumptions and constraints impacting the project, programme, sub portfolio/portfolio, escalating any risks or issues to the appropriate stakeholder within project management.
• Demonstrate understanding and control of key scorecard metrics within scope of own area (project/programme/sub portfolio/portfolio), identifying synergies across the portfolio (as required).
• Managing conflicting priorities for self and team at all times, and communicating clearly across the project and sub-portfolio where priorities and interests may be in conflict.
• Ensuring Governance and controls are put in place and maintained through all stages of delivery.
• Driving continuous improvement across the portfolio of change.
• Managing support resource demand across a sub-portfolio of projects to offer value to the portfolio through defining efficient project support levels within a cost pressured environment.
• Support Change Delivery function as directed to maintain and continually improve upon the processes, procedures and standards required to operate a robust, yet cost effective governance and control framework.
• Support periodic project framework reviews to ensure the project/programme governance and controls reflects best practice.
• Operates within established frameworks, standards and processes.
• Line manage PMO Analysts, demonstrating leadership behaviours, providing day to day support (as required), regular one to ones, setting annual objectives, evaluating performance on an ongoing basis with appropriate feedback, agreeing and supporting completion of robust development plans and training.

What We’re Looking For:

Essential: PMO experience

Desirable: A-Level / Advanced Higher (or equivalent) Prince2 / APM - Practitioner

We want to hire the whole version of you. We are committed to ensuring that everyone feels accepted and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. If your experience looks different from what we’ve advertised and you believe that you can bring value to the role, we’d love to hear from you. If you require any adjustments to the recruitment process, please let us know so we can help you to be at your best.