Head of PMO in London

Howden is a collective – a group of talented and passionate people around the world. We have pushed the boundaries of insurance, with 22,000 employees spanning over 100 countries. Our people are our biggest asset and we measure success by our culture, client service, and growth — founded on a people-first approach.

We are employee-owned and entrepreneurial. We hire talented specialists and empower them to make a difference for clients while building fulfilling careers. Our culture attracts and retains people who value work/life balance, career progression, sustainability, volunteering, and meaningful change.

The Head of PMO leads the central PMO function within Howden’s Project Delivery Team (PDT). The role ensures robust governance, effective portfolio oversight, and consistently high delivery standards across a complex and rapidly expanding project landscape. Operating within Group IMO, the PDT drives organisational change. Our team of Project Managers and Business Analysts supports both Group Functions and Business Areas, delivering strategic initiatives such as regulatory programmes, M&A integrations, and target operating model transformations. The PMO function includes a pool of PMO Analysts who are assigned to major programmes or embedded within Group to support the Transformation Wheel. As multiple project delivery teams operate across Howden, we have mandated standardisation of PMO practices across the Group.

Key Responsibilities

• Review and continuously enhance the PMO vision, operating model, and service catalogue to support Howden’s ambition to build a high performing Centre of Excellence for project delivery.
• Set standards for project management, reporting, governance, benefits management, and milestone tracking across the portfolio.
• Promote a culture of transparency, no surprises delivery, and proactive risk management.
• Work with other PMO functions to set the Project Delivery Framework ensuring all projects follow consistent processes, templates, and governance controls.
• Oversee project approvals (Hopper), change requests, PIDs, health checks, and closure reviews.
• Lead monthly and quarterly governance cycles including Monthly Reporting, PSR QA cycles, and quality assurance of all project artefacts.
• Partner with Group PMO, TMO and divisional PMOs to ensure alignment on standards, minimum controls, and reporting expectations.
• Maintain portfolio visibility across all PDT-supported work.
• Lead monthly/quarterly reporting and insights, ensuring data accuracy and commentary consistency.
• Drive continuous improvement in milestone quality, dependency tracking, and benefits realisation.
• Act as senior SME for our Project Management reporting tool, ensuring the tool supports Group-wide visibility.
• Develop PMO competencies, coaching PMO Analysts and raising capability across the wider PM / BA communities of practice.
• Identify opportunities to streamline processes, automate reporting, and implement best-practice PMO methods.
• Build strong relationships with Programme Directors, Project Managers, BA Leads, Finance, Compliance, and Executive sponsors.
• Represent PDT PMO in Group wide governance bodies, forums and cross functional working groups.
• Ensure PMO provides a high quality business partnering service to project sponsors and delivery teams.
• Lead, develop, and mentor a multi level PMO team, ensuring clear role expectations, progression paths and performance management.
• Support recruitment activity (perm, FTC, contractor) and manage capacity planning aligned to the portfolio.
• Foster a collaborative, inclusive, high performance environment.

Qualifications

Essential:

• Proven experience leading a PMO in a complex, multi workstream environment (preferably financial services, insurance or regulated industries).
• Strong grounding in project/portfolio governance, risk management, RAID control, and assurance.
• Excellent analytical and reporting capability, with experience owning senior level reporting packs.
• Demonstrable ability to influence senior leaders, challenge constructively, and drive quality.
• Experience with modern PMO tooling (e.g. PowerBI, SharePoint).
• Ability to balance strategic thinking with hands on leadership when needed.
• Experience working across globally distributed project environments.

Desirable:

• Exposure to major transformation programmes (e.g., integrations, operational leverage, technology change).
• PMO or project management certifications (APM, MSP, Prince2, PMO-specific credentials).

What we offer

A career that you define. Our business succeeds by allowing our people to make a mark in the areas they care about most: personal development, volunteering, and fundraising for charity, or creating new insurance products that address society’s greatest challenges. And we know that separate home and work lives don’t really exist. If you’re happy and healthy at home, you’re more likely to be happy and fulfilled at work – and vice versa. That’s why we do our best to support our people in every aspect of their lives.

Diversity and Inclusion

At Howden we value diversity - there is no one Howden ‘personality type’. Instead, we’re looking for individuals who share the same values as us: Our successes have all come from someone brave enough to try something new. We support each other, in the small everyday moments and the bigger challenges. We are determined to make a positive difference, at work and beyond. We consider our people our chief competitive advantage and as such we treat colleagues, candidates, clients, and business partners with equality, fairness, and respect – regardless of age, disability, race, religion or belief, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, or family circumstances.

Our sustainability promise

We’re on a life-long journey to become an ever-more sustainable group. It’s a commitment to taking care of our people and the world we live in, to doing good business, and to making a positive impact wherever we can. Our governance processes, company policies, and review systems are all geared towards our goal of making a positive impact in the world.