Save The Children International

ROLE PROFILE

TITLE: Portfolio Planning and Interdependencies Manager
TEAM/PROGRAMME: Transformation Delivery / LOCATION: London, UK
GRADE: TBD / CONTRACT LENGTH: Permanent
CHILD SAFEGUARDING:
Level 2: either the post holder will have access to personal data about children and/or young people as part of their work; or the post holder will be working in a ‘regulated’ position (accountant, barrister, solicitor, legal executive); therefore a police check will be required (at ‘standard’ level in the UK or equivalent in other countries).
ROLE PURPOSE:
The Portfolio Planning and Interdependencies Manager drives the portfolio-wide project planning process (the portfolio runs c10 projects for a total budget of $20M). This includes:
·  Taking ownership of the integrated planning for the whole HPO portfolio: maintaining and validating accurate and up-to-date project delivery timelines through input from the individual project plans; ensuring and overseeing the identification and monitoring of the interdependencies, risks and issues and actively driving their management and resolution with the individual project teams.
·  Providing a key connection between the Project Managers and Portfolio Management team to ensure there is ownership for information on the integrated plan and clear accountability for delivery against the plan.
·  Ensure that resource estimates are in place to deliver the agreed plans and create a consolidated view of the total demand for resources.
·  Work with IT to provide an overall view of demand and ensure that resources can be allocated at the right time for project delivery.
·  Defining and overseeing robust and structured change control procedures for all initiatives that impact portfolio planning.
·  Providing visibility to the leadership team of the portfolio’s status, risks and issues and plans.
SCOPE OF ROLE:
Reports to: Head of Portfolio Planning and Reporting
Staff reporting to this post: No direct reports
Budget Responsibilities: No budget responsibility
KEY AREAS OF ACCOUNTABILITY:
Portfolio Management:
·  Drive the portfolio-wide project planning processes, being actively involved in project-specific planning meetings to determine the overall project delivery timelines, and maintaining those timelines to be accurate and up-to-date as required by the key transformation stakeholders.
·  Constructively challenge and validate project plans to ensure they are realistic, robust, and deliverable-oriented, working with project teams to improve as needed.
·  Maintain the project interdependencies register, and make an active contribution to the identification of new interdependencies. Proactively engage stakeholders to ensure that interdependencies have a clear owner, are built into relevant project plans and are being addressed. Identify the impacts of the interdependencies on the integrated planning, and intervene when there are items which are not being proactively managed, setting up and driving meetings and workshops involving several project teams to ensure timely progress on interdependencies when necessary.
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·  Maintain an audit trail of changes to project timelines, once timelines have been baselined.
·  Ensure alignment with the wider Transformation Delivery team.
Risk and Issue Management:
·  Maintain an awareness of the key risks and issues that could impact the critical path of any project in the portfolio, and identify scenarios for mitigating risks or dealing with issues.
·  Contribute to best practice risk management process and tools for the project management community.
·  Maintain the portfolio risk and issue registers.
Capacity Management:
·  Define, implement and promote best practice capacity and resource management processes, and tools, for all initiatives within the portfolio. These will be included in the Project Manager toolkit that defines the working practices.
·  Maintain a long-term view of project resources required by projects based on deliverables, timelines, and resources included in the deployment plans. The Portfolio Planning and Interdependencies Manager works closely with Transformation Delivery, and the transformation projects, to ensure resource gaps are identified in advance and resolved without negative impact to projects.
·  Facilitate short-term affectation of IT resources to the projects.
·  Provide data to the Head of Portfolio Planning and Reporting on capacity as relevant for decision-making.
Change and Scope Control:
·  Defines, implements and promotes best practice change control process and tools for the portfolio management. These will be included in the Project Manager toolkit that defines the working practices.
·  Ensures changes to the portfolio initiatives are registered, documented, and governed and that proper communication is delivered to those impacted by those changes.
·  Initiates investigation when changes have been made without following appropriate process.
SKILLS AND BEHAVIOURS (SCI Values in Practice):
Accountability:
·  Holds self-accountable for making decisions, managing resources efficiently, achieving and role modelling Save the Children values.
·  Holds the team and partners accountable to deliver on their responsibilities - giving them the freedom to deliver in the best way they see fit, providing the necessary development to improve performance and applying appropriate consequences when results are not achieved.
Ambition:
·  Sets ambitious and challenging goals for themselves and their team, takes responsibility for their own personal development and encourages their team to do the same.
·  Widely shares their personal vision for Save the Children, engages and motivates others future orientated, thinks strategically and on a global scale.
Collaboration:
·  Builds and maintains effective relationships, with their team, colleagues, Members and external partners and supporters.
·  Values diversity, sees it as a source of competitive strength.
·  Approachable, good listener, easy to talk to.
Creativity:
·  Develops and encourages new and innovative solutions.
·  Willing to take disciplined risks.
Integrity:
·  Honest, encourages openness and transparency; demonstrates highest levels of integrity.
·  Drives transparency of risks and issues in the Transformation Project Portfolio.
QUALIFICATIONS:
·  P3O or Portfolio Management (MoP) Practitioner qualification or desirable.
EXPERIENCE:
Essential:
·  Significant prior experience inwith a multi-million portfolio and/or in project/programme management of high value, big impact, complex projects/programmes, ideally within an international environment, and a large and complex portfolio.
·  Proven experience of managing/enabling IT projects to be delivered on time, on budget and to quality
·  Proven experience in, and detailed knowledge of, project management practices, standards and methodologies.
·  Demonstrable experience in the active use of portfolio management tools.
·  Experienced at building detailed content knowledge and using this to influence planning activities and decisions.
·  Strong leadership skills, including using assertiveness and persuasion to influence senior leaders
·  Able to demonstrate instances of initiative that have delivered organisational benefits
·  Excellent communication skills (written & oral English), including the ability to communicate and present to senior stakeholders (including at executive level).
·  Able to build strong relationships within the organisation and influence others.
·  Experienced in analysing and extracting top level information to be shared with senior stakeholders.
Desirable:
·  Non-profit sector knowledge/experience.
·  Second language.
Additional job responsibilities
The job duties and responsibilities as set out above are not exhaustive and the post holder may be required to carry out additional duties within reasonableness of their level of skills and experience.
Equal Opportunities
The post holder is required to carry out the duties in accordance with the SCI Equal Opportunities and Diversity policies and procedures.
Health and Safety
The post holder is required to carry out the duties in accordance with SCI Health and Safety policies and procedures.
Child Safeguarding:
We need to keep children safe so our selection process, which includes rigorous background checks, reflects our commitment to the protection of children from abuse.
JD written by: Julien Thouand / Date: January 12, 2018
JD agreed by: / Date:
Job Description updated By: / Date:
Evaluated: / Date: