Project Manager

Location: UK or Poland (residents only – relocation and sponsorship not provided)

Role purpose

The Project Manager will be managing the design, development, planning and implementation of large projects across product through a matrix of internal and external resources and partnerships, to ensure delivery of value and effective achievement of business objectives. They will oversee effective project design, planning, delivery, implementation and realisation, manage and/or influence virtual, dispersed project teams to deliver high quality products and services globally.

Main accountabilities

• Project leadership and management
• Defines and drives a clear vision and delivery strategy for the project, ensuring alignment with key business priorities while remaining adaptable to changing needs and insights.
• Provides both professional/people leadership for a medium to large scale project.
• Takes end to end ownership for delivering outcomes beyond milestones, ensuring the project achieves measurable impact and value.
• Develops and evolves project and delivery plans that are realistic, data driven, and responsive to risk, dependencies and shifting priorities.
• Establishes a project and delivery environment where teams are set up to succeed, with the right resources, structure, capabilities, and ways of working.
• Balances pace, quality, and cost to deliver efficiently while maintaining focus on outcomes.
• Project development
• Shapes and challenges early business ideas, actively contributing to robust business cases that are outcome-focussed and evidence-based.
• Guides initiatives from concept through to delivery, ensuring continuous alignment between strategy and execution.
• Builds and maintains external networks to access, absorb and apply professional best practice to develop and improve the British Council’s project management methodology and toolkit.
• Performance, reporting and resourcing
• Ensures the right resources, skills, and capabilities are in place, working across teams and partners to adjust capacity as needed.
• Defines clear success measures, benefits, and performance indicators, ensuring alignment with stakeholder expectations and organisational strategy and priorities.
• Leads reviews, washups and retrospectives, embedding continuous improvement into delivery and sharing insights to build organisational capability.
• Customers and stakeholders
• Supports management of senior relationships across the British Council, as well as with external agencies, partners and individuals, as required, to support the strategic vision and value realisation.
• Builds and maintain effective relationships with internal partners and stakeholders, to ensure the effective delivery of project goals and outcomes.
• Communicates with transparency, clarity and confidence, ensuring stakeholders understand progress, risks, options, and outcomes.
• Risk and compliance
• Applies governance and compliance requirements in a pragmatic way that enables delivery rather than slows it down.
• Ensures the British Council meets all relevant internal and external compliance and client requirements (financial, HR, quality management, regulatory, etc.) across the project, to ensure the organisation and all its sub-contractors operate legally, with integrity, and in a way that manages risk effectively.
• Commercial and financial management
• Manages budgets and commercial performance to ensure delivery achieves strong value for money and expected returns.
• Makes informed trade-offs between scope, cost, and timelines to maximise impact and value.
• Negotiate, procure and authorise (to designated sign-off levels) agreements with partners/sub-contractors/stakeholders and sign-off contracts relating to delivery of the product or service, to meet optimal cost efficiency measures.
• Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI)
• Consistently creates an inclusive and anti-racist organisational culture, being aware of own biases and taking action to mitigate against these.
• Ensures people feel valued and are treated equitably, with support for people’s well-being and mental health particularly through periods of significant change.
• Has a deep understanding of and takes accountability for putting the British Council’s approach to equality, diversity and inclusion and anti-racism into practice.
• Makes time for and visibly engages with learning and development related to EDI and anti-racism.

Certification and Professional Qualifications

Project management qualification (SAFe, Agile, PRINCE2, PMP, etc.) and/or equivalent relevant experience.

Education

First degree or equivalent qualification.

Role specific knowledge and experience

Minimum / essential

• Demonstrable experience of leading and successfully managing large (multi-million) projects for a multi-national organisation with considerable global reach, including procurement and management of third party supplier and partner arrangements (on a case-by-case basis).
• Experience of using formal planning tools to create project plans where appropriate (ie, Miro, Jira, Confluence, Planner, Microsoft Project, etc.)
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills using various tools including Outlook, Word, Teams, Excel, and PowerPoint.
• Fluency in English.
• Current residency in either the UK or Poland with unlimited right to work.

Desirable

• Experience of leading on digital/online/technology projects on a global scale.
• Experience of supporting the negotiation of legal contracts with external partners.
• Experience of delivering learning and/or assessment programmes and projects.

Ideal candidate:

• Strategic programme leadership
• Ability to lead complex, multi‑million‑pound programmes and projects aligned to organisational strategy, translating business objectives into clear delivery plans and outcomes.
• Thinks beyond individual projects; focused on long‑term value, benefits realisation, and organisational impact.
• Delivery excellence in complex environments
• Proven capability to deliver large, high‑risk projects through dispersed, matrixed teams and external partners, across multiple geographies.
• Comfortable with ambiguity; resilient, calm under pressure, and accountable for end‑to‑end delivery.
• Stakeholder engagement and influence
• Strong ability to engage, challenge, and influence senior stakeholders, balancing competing priorities and driving decision‑making without formal authority.
• Values collaboration while not avoiding difficult conversations.
• Governance, risk and assurance leadership
• Expertise in establishing and running robust project governance, including RAID management, assurance processes, and compliance in regulated environments.
• Risk‑aware but pragmatic; proactive in surfacing issues early and committed to transparency and control.
• Commercial and financial acumen
• Demonstrated experience in managing large budgets, controlling costs, delivering value for money, and working with procurement, contracts, and third‑party suppliers.
• Commercially minded and makes evidence‑based financial decisions.
• Professional project management practice
• Strong grounding in recognised project/programme management methodologies (e.g. Agile, PRINCE2, PMP, SAFe), with the ability to apply them flexibly based on context.
• Method‑led but not method‑bound; focused on outcomes rather than process for its own sake.
• Inclusive, values‑led leadership
• Ability to build inclusive, psychologically safe teams, role‑model EDI principles, and lead with awareness of cultural and contextual differences across global environments.
• Reflective and self‑aware; committed to inclusive practice, continuous learning, and ethical leadership.

British Council values and behaviours

British Council values and behaviours are applicable across our organisation, in all roles and at all levels. They are important because they say what we stand for at the British Council and help us to deliver our strategy. We use them to guide our decision making, as well as guiding how we treat one another and the people we work with. These will be assessed in the selection process. Our values are: Open and Committed; Expert and Inclusive; Optimistic and Bold.

Unit: English & Exams / Product / Delivery and Governance

Work style: hybrid

Pay band: 8

Annual salary range: PLN 192,000 - 252,000 (Poland) £38,000 - £46,000 (UK)