Programme Design Governance Lead

About the role

The Enterprise Transformation Programme is a multi-year journey focused on transforming the Haleon business, building an organisation that is wired for excellence to be able to deliver our ‘Win as One’ strategy and drive growth through continuous improvement. The programme aims to strengthen the heartbeat of our business, enabling us to become more agile, efficient, and innovative, and is enabled through SAP S/4HANA. The Programme Design Governance Lead plays a critical role in turning this ambition into reality by ensuring the Enterprise Transformation delivery enables the functional ambition and unlocks value at pace.

Key Responsibilities

• The Programme Design Governance Lead ensures that business and technical design decisions are coherent, standard-led, enterprise safe, and decision-ready.
• The role governs the design interlock across the Enterprise Transformation programme Business Design Authority and Technical Design Authority and the Enterprise Design Authority, working closely with Business Process Owners, Programme Leads, and Technology teams to manage interdependencies and protect end-to-end enterprise design integrity.
• They ensure design decisions are traceable, aligned to design principles, and protect long-term enterprise value.

Design Governance Framework

• Create and own the Design Governance Approach, to ensure it is relevant to the Programme, compliant with overall Haleon governance expectations, and aligned to SAP S/4 principles.
• Embed design governance into the broader Programme Governance Framework, keeping it current across programme phases.
• Review key design deliverables for readiness before Stage Gates, ensuring process, data, integration, and technology designs are robust and meet design guardrails.

Orchestrate Design Decision Governance

• Ensure Enterprise Design Authority (EDA) and Programme Business Design Authority (BDA) decisions are final, traceable, and auditable, with clear lineage to enterprise objectives and S4 design principles.
• Maintain the Design Decision register, tracking approvals, conditions, and follow-up actions.
• Act as Secretariat and Quality Keeper for the EDA and BDA, ensuring submissions are properly framed, pre-aligned, and supported by impacts, implications, and clear recommendations.
• Set and enforce clear submission standards, templates, and pre-read expectations to ensure design forums focus on decisions, not discovery.
• Communicate effectively on outcomes arising from Design Governance and escalations requiring intervention from leadership and/or external governance bodies.
• Ensure escalations are design-led and evidence-based, not delivery-panic driven.

Design Coherence

• Ensure 'fit to standard' is the default position and that any deviations (e.g. process exceptions, workarounds) are explicitly justified, enterprise-assessed, and approved through governance.
• Challenge proposals that create unnecessary business/technical debt or future legacy burden, escalating to the Enterprise Design Authority where enterprise impact exists.
• Review and assure design readiness prior to Stage Gates; confirming that business and technical designs are sufficiently mature and aligned to guardrails.
• Confirm that unresolved design risks or dependencies are explicitly surfaced to governance rather than implicitly accepted.

Design Interlock and Interdependent Programmes

• Establish, and actively drive, cross-programme design working groups to resolve interdependencies before escalation is required.
• Partner with workstreams and adjacent programmes to surface implicit dependencies, clarify definition of done, and agree delivery dates.
• Classify interdependencies across dimensions (process, tech, data, security, op model), ensuring clarity of impact and escalation route.
• Assess whether dependencies create local optimisation risk or enterprise-wide consequences requiring escalation beyond programme scope.
• Ensure design decisions taken in adjacent programmes are properly routed through the appropriate design authorities based on scope and enterprise impact.
• Maintain end-to-end traceability of design.