Freelance Senior Project Manager (Boots) in City of London

We are KHWS, an insight-led marketing agency based in the City of London close to Blackfriars Bridge. We are a bright and hardworking group of professionals working as a tight knit team, covering strategy, creative, customer experience and digital delivery.

About the Role

The successful candidate will be responsible for running delivery on a multi-year programme to build an enterprise-level, multi-brand design system. Holding the timing plans, dependencies and risk log, keep everyone aligned through clear status and cadence, and protect the legwork so the design and engineering teams can build.

The programme develops an enterprise design system spanning multiple brands and 100+ sites for a global client. It runs across several years. The role sits inside the KHWS delivery team. The immediate focus is the 2026 phase of work, setting up the programme and getting the early workstreams moving.

A large part of this role is managing stakeholder dynamics. The work runs across a range of brands and leaders, with technical, design and client-side delivery functions all holding a stake. Reading the sensitivities and positioning the work carefully across those groups matters as much as the plan itself. Business priorities and focus will shift as the programme progresses, and the role needs to absorb that without losing the thread. The role is hands on, working as the sole Project Manager alongside Client Service and Design Teams.

The 2026 work

• Stand up the programme. Agree ways of working, tooling and cadence, and set the comms rhythm.
• Break the KHWS deliverables down into milestones. Work with the team to ensure delivery on time, managing internal and external dependencies.
• Build and maintain the timing plan for the year. Sequence the early workstreams and keep the plan live as priorities shift.
• Stand up and run the risk log. Keep dependency mapping and risks current and visible.
• Set up the requirements and stakeholder access work so it lands with the right people at the right time.

Ongoing responsibilities

• Own the timing plans across multiple workstreams.
• Manage dependencies end to end. Track them, flag them early, and keep the critical path clear.
• Run the risk log. Keep risks and dependencies mapped, current and visible.
• Manage deliverables. Coordinate output from the KHWS design team and from the wider functions and teams beyond it.
• Create and maintain status documents and support decks. Keep a clear running record of where each workstream sits, what is blocked, and what is coming.
• Arrange and run the call cadence. Set up internal and client calls, hold the agenda, and keep the comms rhythm steady.
• Anchor the programme to milestones and client check-ins, not fixed completion dates.
• Manage day to day client contact at delivery level. Position the work with an understanding of the sensitivities across brands and leaders. Keep framing grounded and plain.
• Keep scope boundaries clean. Design ends at fully specified components. Content modelling, CMS schema, analytics tagging and CMS hooks sit alongside the design system, not within it.

Experience

• Proven delivery of enterprise-level design systems end to end.
• Strong on timing plans, dependency management, risk logs and status reporting across multiple parallel workstreams.
• Skilled at working across a range of brands, leaders and functions, with a feel for the politics and the positioning it takes.
• Comfortable holding a plan steady while business priorities shift.
• Working knowledge of design tokens, three-tier token architecture, component libraries, and contribution and governance models.
• Comfortable with WCAG 2.2 AA, atomic principles, and a CMS-agnostic component approach.
• Confident managing senior client stakeholders at Enterprise level.