Programme Delivery Manager - Department for Education - G6 in Manchester

Location: London - SW1P 3BT, Sheffield - S1 2FJ, Manchester - M1 2WD

In the Schools Digital portfolio, our aim is to support schools and teachers to have the best environment, tools and support so that every child can achieve and thrive. We work with Schools Group to deliver Manifesto commitments on recruiting and retaining teachers, including the 6.5k manifesto commitment, SEND reform and helping schools improve. This is an exciting time to join the portfolio with significant reform programmes underway for SEND and schools, which will have a direct impact on the outcomes on the teaching landscape and help every child achieve and thrive.

Our Diverse And Inclusive Culture Reflects The Society We Live In. This Helps Us To Achieve Better Outcomes For All Our Users. We Work In Multi-disciplinary Teams Using Agile Methods To Innovate And Radically Improve Services That:

• Support schools to manage and improve their performance
• Support teachers and teacher trainee mentors to provide the best start in life for children
• Support children to get the best SEND support
• Drive economic growth

This vacancy uses the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework.

In the Schools Digital portfolio we work closely with policy teams and Service Owners to research, design and build services that help provide schools, teachers and a system where every child is achieving and thriving.

As a Programme Delivery Manager in Schools Digital, you will:

• Lead, coach and motivate multiple agile multi-disciplinary teams, helping them plan and deliver their work, ensuring they make progress, meet the government service standard and create services that meet users’ needs.
• Help Schools Digital teams conduct discoveries, alphas, betas and get to live, delivering services that meet the needs of Schools, teachers and children.
• Identify the people, skills and resources that teams need to deliver the agreed goals across Schools Digital.
• Identify and challenge organisational processes that impede delivery and work with stakeholders as needed to improve them, including implementing and iterating Schools Digital governance processes.
• Use your delivery expertise to identify and actively manage risks, issues and internal and external dependencies across multiple delivery teams.
• Act as an escalation point for risks raised by delivery teams, supporting or intervening as necessary to enable prompt and effective management.
• Work with Schools Policy Leaders to create the best services for users, coaching and influencing Schools Policy to make evidenced-led decisions and champion agile ways of working, and embed user-centred design in both ways of working and decision-making.
• Be part of the Schools Digital Senior Leadership Team.

Working with the Senior Leadership in Schools Digital you will also:

• Help create a culture and environment where teams can deliver effectively, are passionate about their work and can bring their ‘whole selves’ to work.
• Play an active part in our digital delivery community of practice in Schools Digital and DfE.
• Working with the Head of Profession for Delivery Managers you will help to drive cultural and procedural change through the community.
• Build agile delivery management capability through hands on coaching and identifying development opportunities in and outside of our Delivery Manager community.

Person Specification

Essential Criteria

• Financial and Commercial Management - you can act as the escalation point and resolve large or high risk commercial management issues, you can coach others in appropriate commercial management, you can influence or create complex budgets across an organisation, programme or product view, manage the budget you are given and make it work.
• Maintaining delivery momentum - Using Agile principles, you optimise the delivery flow of teams, actively address the most complicated risks, issues and dependencies including where ownership exists outside the team or no clear ownership exists, identify innovative ways to unblock issues.
• Making a process work - identify and challenge organisational processes of increasing complexity and those processes that are unnecessarily complicated, add value and can coach the organisation to inspect and adapt processes, guide teams through the implementation of a new process. You can coach and lead teams in Agile and Lean good practices, create and tailor the right approach for a team, challenging, evaluating and iterating the approach through the life cycle.
• Communicating between the technical and non-technical - You can mediate between people and strengthen relationships, adopting the appropriate communication method with stakeholders at all levels, manage stakeholder expectations and moderate difficult discussions about high risk and complex topics, even within constrained timescales, speak on behalf of, and represent the community to, large audiences inside and outside the organisation.
• Planning - You can lead a continual planning process in a very complex environment, plan beyond product delivery, identify dependencies in plans across services and co-ordinate delivery, coach other teams as the central point of expertise.

Desirable Criteria

• Community collaboration - you can solve and unblock issues between teams or departments at the highest level, you can coach the organisation on team dynamics and conflict resolution, while also building and growing the community.
• Life cycle Management - You can, lead and coach teams through different phases of the life cycle, ensure effective support for the product or service and its users, predict, prevent, mitigate and manage potential risks at different phases of the life cycle, contribute to the assessment of other teams with assessments.

Desirable criteria will only be assessed at interview, in the event of a tie break situation, to make an informed decision.