Senior Commercial Officer

Role: Senior Commercial Officer

Location: Manchester or Blackpool Office (40% hybrid – soon to increase to 60%)

Minimum Requirement:

The individual will provide end-to-end commercial support for procurements and contracts within the one of the sub-categories of Digital, so this role relate to buying Digital goods and services. This will include market analysis, requirements gathering, preparation of sourcing strategy, development of tender documents, execution of tender process, contract award and contract management. They will also be required to ensure that all relevant DWP and wider government governance and policy is followed, as well as strict compliance to procurement regulations.

Procurement will be primarily through mini-competitions under existing CCS frameworks. The individual will be responsible for:

• Ensuring good communication links with relevant digital and financial stakeholders.

• Maintaining an accurate and timely pipeline of procurement activity and awarded contracts (in Microsoft Lists), interacting with a wide range of stakeholders to en-sure their needs are represented on the pipeline and commercial activity begins, then progresses, in a timely manner to ensure sensible procurement timescales are followed;

• Bringing market knowledge to bear to support Digital in determining how to ap-proach the relevant market (IT communication and collaboration tools and ser-vices and desktop software and services), while continually working to build your own and colleague’s understanding of that market;

• Designing and conducting procurements for required software and services, in-cluding helping refine requirement, recommending a sourcing strategy, executing the procurement process, completing relevant governance and assurance and fi-nalising effective, legal and strong value-for-money contracts.

• Providing commercial management of resulting contracts, and through advice and oversight, ensuring that stakeholders are performing appropriate operational management of contracts in addition to commercial management led by yourself.

• Seeking out and delivering savings opportunities and opportunities to add value (social or otherwise); register and plan for the delivery of such savings and report on progress.

• Ensuring all relevant information is stored appropriately and updated, including document retention, eProcurement system updates and pipeline updates.

Essential Skills

• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills;

• Strong commercial acumen;

• Experience of running procurements through CCS frameworks;

• Understanding of and ability to apply UK procurement legislation (particularly PCR2015 and PA2023) as it applies to central government departments;

• Negotiation skills;

• Ability to manage a busy workload with competing priorities;

• Contract and supplier management.

Desirable Skills

• Experience of buying in the Digital market;

• Knowledge of the relevant markets;

• Ability to apply market knowledge to secure better deals.

• Experience of using CCS Technology Frameworks (Technology Services, Digital Outcomes, Digital Specialists and Programmes, Technology Products and Services, G-Cloud, etc.)

• MCIPS / CIPS or Equivalent