PMO Manager in Manchester

Janes equips defence, government, and industry leaders with objective, accurate, and shareable data and analysis.

Our experts combine advanced technology with proven tradecraft to deliver validated and contextual intelligence to assess threats, accelerate decisions, and anticipate change with confidence.

We deliver our intelligence with the flexibility to fuse it with multiple sources in any system, enrich AI solutions, or access it through our portal.

Job purpose

The PMO Manager will provide clear, accurate and forward-looking portfolio information, governance and control across major initiatives.

The role will establish a reliable view of delivery performance, emerging risks, dependencies, defects and change requests, enabling informed prioritisation through the demand management process.

How you will contribute at Janes

Planning

• Own and maintain an integrated portfolio plan for major initiatives, providing a clear view of scope, milestones, sequencing, dependencies, resources and target outcomes.
• Coordinate planning across Product, Engineering, Operations and other stakeholders to ensure delivery plans are realistic, aligned and supported by clear ownership.
• Establish proportionate planning standards and ensure initiatives have credible baselines, delivery forecasts, critical paths and agreed assumptions.
• Support capacity and resource planning, identifying constraints, competing priorities and capability gaps that could affect delivery commitments.
• Integrate delivery, testing, operational readiness, Acceptance into Service and non-functional requirement activities into initiative plans from the outset.
• Lead regular planning and replanning activity, assessing the impact of changes and providing evidence-based options and recommendations to support prioritisation decisions.

Management Information and Delivery Visibility

• Own and manage portfolio management information, ensuring reporting is accurate, consistent, timely and decision-focused.
• Maintain five-sprint delivery views alongside milestone-level views for all major initiatives.
• Provide a clear look-ahead to the end of the current sprint and visibility of work planned for the next sprint.
• Identify delivery trends, emerging risks, constraints and decisions requiring leadership attention.
• Ensure reporting provides a single, transparent view of the current state of delivery.

Governance and Process Management

• Define, maintain and continuously improve proportionate portfolio and project delivery processes.
• Coordinate dependency management across teams and initiatives, ensuring dependencies have named owners, target dates and agreed resolution plans.
• Facilitate regular issue reviews with relevant stakeholders, including CC and Product representatives, and drive actions through to closure.
• Coordinate user acceptance testing planning, including scope, readiness, environments, resources, entry and exit criteria, defect triage and sign-off.
• Promote consistent governance standards while avoiding unnecessary administration.

Incident Management

• Facilitate the incident management process from initial identification through to resolution and closure.
• Work closely with the Service Delivery and Engineering Director’s to coordinate and drive the timely resolution of incidents.
• Act as the driving force behind resolver groups, ensuring the right teams engage promptly, ownership is clear and actions are progressed at pace.
• Coordinate incident triage, prioritisation, escalation, stakeholder communication and recovery activity.
• Track incident actions, decisions, dependencies and target resolution times, escalating blockers where required.
• Ensure significant incidents are reviewed, lessons are captured and resulting corrective or preventative actions are completed.

Operations and Service Acceptance

• Coordinate Acceptance into Service (AIS) activities for major initiatives, ensuring operational stakeholders are engaged from the outset and that service acceptance requirements, owners, evidence and target dates are clearly defined.
• Maintain an integrated operational readiness plan covering support arrangements, monitoring, alerting, documentation, training, service desk readiness, resilience, continuity, security and transition to business-as-usual support.
• Ensure non-functional requirements are identified early, agreed with relevant stakeholders, built into delivery plans and acceptance criteria, and evidenced through appropriate testing and assurance.
• Track operational readiness risks, dependencies, actions, exceptions and service acceptance decisions, escalating gaps that could affect go-live or ongoing service performance.
• Coordinate readiness reviews and go-live recommendations, ensuring entry and exit criteria are met and any residual risks are formally understood, owned and accepted.
• Support effective handover into service, including early-life support arrangements, performance monitoring and completion of post-implementation actions.

Major Initiative and RAID Management

• Provide project management support and oversight for all major initiatives.
• Establish and maintain clear RAID logs covering risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies.
• Ensure each RAID item has an owner, impact assessment, mitigating action, due date and status.
• Escalate material delivery concerns promptly and provide evidence-based recommendations.
• Track agreed actions, milestones, decisions and outcomes to completion.

Backlog Ownership and Maintenance

• Review and clean up individual team backlogs, removing duplicates, obsolete items and incomplete records.
• Create and maintain a single consolidated backlog of defects and change requests to provide an accurate view of the current position.
• Apply consistent categorisation, ownership, priority, impact, status and ageing information across backlog items.
• Run a formal backlog review every two weeks with appropriate business, Product and delivery stakeholders.
• Analyse the backlog to identify defects or change requests that require consideration, escalation or prioritisation.
• Provide recommendations and evidence from backlog analysis to feed into the demand management process.

Deliver the following Outcomes

• A clean, prioritised and actively managed consolidated backlog of defects and change requests.
• A dependable five-sprint and milestone view that supports proactive delivery planning and decision-making.
• Fortnightly backlog governance with clear ownership, actions and escalation routes.
• Early identification of defects, change requests, dependencies and issues requiring leadership consideration.
• High-quality information that informs portfolio prioritisation and the demand management process.
• Consistent RAID discipline and improved predictability across major initiatives.
• Major initiatives transition into service with agreed non-functional requirements evidenced, operational readiness confirmed and residual service risks explicitly owned and accepted.

The ideal skills and experience for this role are

• At least five years’ experience in a PMO or portfolio management role, with a track record of bringing structure, oversight and accountability to project delivery.
• Strong project management skills, with excellent organisation, meticulous planning and close attention to detail.
• Confident communication and presentation skills, with the ability to work effectively with stakeholders at different levels and collaborate across teams, particularly with Demand Management and Engineering.
• Experience producing clear, accurate reporting on deliverables, outcomes, issues and risks, and using it to support progress tracking and accountability.
• An understanding of service and customer needs, operational security and incident management, including the ability to coordinate and facilitate incident management.
• A proactive, self-starting approach, with the confidence to raise concerns and challenge others directly and professionally.

You are open, honest and mature in how you handle difficult conversations.

Desirable experience

• Experience in software development, with a general understanding of Agile ways of working and the software development lifecycle.
• Significant infrastructure programme experience may also be relevant, particularly if you have less direct software development experience.

Benefits

• 27 days of annual leave
• Healthy half (0.5 day leave every 6 months for wellbeing)
• Leave- study/ volunteer/ reserve forces
• Pension plan (6% employer contribution)
• Private medical insurance – BUPA
• Maternity (100% of basic salary for the first 26 weeks followed by Statutory Maternity Pay)
• Paternity (100% of basic salary for 6 weeks)
• Life cover
• Access to Linked In Learning
• Access to an on-site gym (Only in Croydon)
• Life at Janes

We believe Janes is truly a great place to work.

Our values and leadership code drive everything we do, and we understand that the right behaviours and culture will always result in the best outcomes for our customers, our colleagues, our shareholders, and our business.

We provide a supportive, stretching, and dynamic environment with the ability for you to grow rapidly, both personally and professionally.

Janes is an inclusive and equal opportunities employer and encourages applications regardless of age, race, disability, religion / belief, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, marriage or civil partnership, pregnancy/maternity, or gender.

Although this role is advertised as full time, Janes believed that flexibility at work can provide many significant benefits both to our colleagues and the business.

We already work in a hybrid style across all offices and regions and can support different ways of working and offer different flexible working arrangements.

So, if you are interested and have any requirements or needs in the way you would like to work, please apply, and speak to us about this.

• We will always consider part time or flexible applications
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