PMO Manager in Bristol

At Unite Students our aim is to create a Home for Success for our students, using technology and data to empower them to find their home and have a great stay with us, and a great experience throughout their student life. The PMO Manager will provide oversight, governance and management of a number of projects in the transformation and tech portfolio, ensuring alignment to the overall business strategy and objectives. Working closely with the PMO Lead and the Project Managers, they will proactively support projects whilst providing respectful challenge to ensure the projects deliver to agreed budgets and benefits. The successful candidate will be a self-starter with attention to detail, a drive for quality and have the ability and skills to build excellent collaborative working relationships. They will have a strong internal customer focus, excellent organisational skills and be able to understand the bigger picture as well as the detail that sits beneath it.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Ensure adoption of best practice aligned to our standard PMO governance framework including regular reviews and audits.
• Support Programme and Project planning processes, including providing assurance on the quality and completeness of the plans.
• Play a key role in raising the bar on how we deliver projects, changing the mindsets and behaviours to enable that.
• Responsible for connecting your projects with the portfolio, ensuring effective two-way flow of information and collaboration for alignment.
• Gain thorough understanding of interdependencies between projects and their impact on the portfolio.
• Actively liaise with project/programme work-streams and contributing to overall planning, data analysis, problem solving and project/programme co-ordination.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement and implement best practices and lessons learned from completed projects across the organisation.
• Schedule and lead Programme and Project governance meetings, capturing notes and actions arising from meetings.
• Set up and maintain project files and manage user access permissions on SharePoint and the Teams workspace; maintain document control procedures.
• Support the co-ordination of project and workstream inputs to various programme and project documents such as the programme business case including project costs and benefits.
• Schedule and lead Gateway meetings, inviting relevant stakeholders, ensuring all information is provided on which a go/no-go decision can be made.
• Monitor, analyse and co-ordinate RAID logs, risks, issues, actions, dependencies, changes, decisions, and lessons learned.

What We’re Looking for in You

• A confident individual who can build relationships with Senior Business leads and respectfully challenge where required.
• Experience in the management of a Programme of projects across a business function.
• Experience of Waterfall and Agile methodologies and project governance.
• Ability to identify & evaluate portfolio-level risks, issues & dependencies, identify mitigating actions and track through to resolution.
• Experience of project and dependency planning and scheduling to evaluate do-ability of plans considering volume of change and supply/demand.
• Excellent stakeholder engagement and communication skills.
• Able to work within a fast-paced environment.

What You’ll Get in Return

• A discretionary annual bonus so you can share in the company’s success.
• 25 days paid holiday and an annual holiday buying scheme, with 5 additional days awarded for long service.
• A generous pension scheme – employer contributions between 5% and 11% depending on how much you save.
• Various benefits to support your health and wellbeing including a Healthcare Cash Plan, an Employee Assistance Programme, a Wellbeing platform and a Gym benefit that you can share with your family and friends.
• Enhanced Family Leave including 18 weeks full pay for birthing parents and 4 weeks for non-birthing parents.
• Lots of other great benefits including an annual ShareSave scheme, Employee Life Assurance, a discounts portal and more!

About Unite Students

Founded in 1991, Unite Students is the UK’s leading provider of purpose-built student accommodation. You can find us in 23 leading university towns and cities, with 70,000 students calling US home! We are driven by our values, culture, and a commitment to develop diverse and inclusive teams, filled with positive energy and new ideas. Instinctive inclusion. We know that to create and maintain a happy healthy organisation, we have to work hard to ensure inclusion isn’t just what we do but who we are. People make Unite Students. Employees, students and neighbours all contribute to building environments where we can all thrive. Room for Everyone. We’re proud to be an employer that embraces individuality, and we’re passionate about building inclusive teams. We focus on creating a collaborative culture where you can be you, where your voice is heard, and where you can truly belong. We take great pride in being rated Gold Investors in People and are constantly striving to provide the highest standard of learning and development opportunities and professional pathways for our people. Building a home for success, for both our employees and students, requires exceptional people with a passion for creating room for everyone, doing what’s right, keeping US safe, and raising the bar. Join us as we build better experiences for students that live with us.