Strategic Engagement Manager in City of Westminster

The role suits someone capable of working closely with diverse stakeholder groups (including with partners and other lawyers) in a fast‑paced professional services environment, who can combine structured programme delivery with a practical, sleeves‑rolled‑up approach: engaging stakeholders, converting feedback into actions, tracking adoption and issues, and supporting engagement, training and continuous improvement across the business.

Responsibilities

• Support delivery of the adoption plan for new finance processes and related ways of working across the matter lifecycle.
• Work with business and finance stakeholders to identify adoption risks, pain points and resistance; help design and implement mitigations.
• Gather feedback from users (fee earners, practice support, finance teams and other business services) and translate it into clear actions, priorities and improvements.
• Help define and track adoption measures (e.g. usage, compliance, process adherence, user confidence), escalating issues and recommending interventions.
• Build credible working relationships with senior stakeholders and day‑to‑day users across the firm.
• Facilitate workshops, focus groups and check‑ins to surface issues, align expectations and drive decisions on improvements.
• Act as a "bridge" between programme leadership, finance, IT and operational teams to ensure changes are understood and workable in practice.
• Identify and anticipate points of friction between stakeholder groups, proactively engaging with stakeholders to surface concerns, resolve issues and maintain alignment in support of successful delivery and adoption.
• Draft and coordinate change communications (updates, FAQs, guidance notes, intranet content) to support awareness and adoption.
• Support training planning and delivery (including briefings, drop‑ins, "how to" materials) and help maintain supporting documentation.
• Produce clear, consistent communications and materials, adapting content, format and channels to different stakeholder groups to support effective engagement and participation.
• Work closely with firmwide internal communications team to ensure communications are carefully coordinated.
• Responsible for a comprehensive and pragmatic adoption plan.
• Support governance: prepare agendas, minutes, actions and status reporting for relevant working groups and programme board.
• Track dependencies and coordinate across workstreams to keep embedding activities moving at pace.
• Help find solutions to challenges stakeholders may be facing in the adoption or application in new ways of working, or understanding what is expected of their roles.
• Spot opportunities to improve adoption of new processes and introduce templates and guidance as users begin operating in the new model.
• Issue tracking and triage: triage issues (pragmatically), coordinate resolution and identify root causes.
• Work flexibly across tasks to meet programme needs, including ad hoc analysis, drafting of communications, aide memoires and briefing notes.

Key Relationships

• Head of Strategic Engagement (to whom this role reports)
• Chief Financial Officer
• Programme leadership (Project Elevate), Finance leadership and operational finance teams
• Practice groups, Partners, fee earners, matter management stakeholders, secretarial/practice support
• IT / systems teams and the Project Management Office (PMO)
• Communications team
• Other Business Services teams impacted by end‑to‑end process changes

What Success Looks Like

• Stakeholders are informed, engaged and supported; adoption issues are surfaced early and addressed quickly.
• Embedding activities are delivered reliably (plans, comms, training support, reporting), with clear visibility of progress and risks.
• New finance‑related ways of working become "business as usual", with reduced friction and clearer guidance for users.
• Programme leadership has confident oversight of adoption metrics, user feedback themes and priority improvements.

Qualifications

• Demonstrable experience supporting change/transformation initiatives, ideally in a professional services environment (law firm experience strongly preferred).
• Strong programme/project management capability: planning, tracking actions, preparing governance materials, and driving follow‑through.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate complex process change into clear, practical messages for different audiences.
• Confidence and credibility to engage with senior stakeholders (to include delivery of training), while also being effective with front‑line users and operational teams.
• Courage to address issues, engage with stakeholders directly to both listen and manage feedback, and judgement to recognize what issues need to be triaged / escalated.
• Highly organised, detail‑oriented and dependable, with the ability to manage multiple priorities and deadlines in a fast‑moving environment.
• Agile, adaptable and solutions‑focused: comfortable with ambiguity, able to "roll sleeves up" and do what's needed to keep delivery moving.
• Pro‑active self‑starter able to "hit the ground running" with the ability to handle pace.
• Strong facilitation skills (workshops, feedback sessions, briefings) and the ability to handle challenge constructively.
• Good analytical skills: able to synthesize feedback/data into themes, risks and actionable recommendations.

Desirable

• Familiarity with law firm operating models, stakeholder groups and practical realities of fee earning and practice support workflows.
• Experience supporting training development and delivery, including aide memoires/FAQs and stakeholder readiness activities.
• Collaborative team player with high personal accountability and a calm, professional manner.
• Discreet and trustworthy, with strong awareness of confidentiality expectations in a law firm environment.
• Proactive, curious and improvement‑minded: asks the right questions and follows issues through to resolution.