Army – Project Delivery Professionals (SEO)

Job summary

The Ministry of Defence employs over 50,000 Civil Servants. Within that, the Army Top Level Budget (TLB) employs around 7,000 MOD Civil Servants located at over 300 locations. Ours is a diverse workforce, with roles ranging from trainers, human resources, teachers, and psychologists to storekeepers, financiers, project and programme managers, and policy secretariat staff. There are many different functions and professions delivering key outputs for the Army. As such using data to aid understanding of our workforce is vital.

The Army’s Programmes Directorate brings together our key change programmes to ensure they are delivered to performance, cost and time. We are committed to Project, Programme & Portfolio Management (P3M) and delivery. From every item of basic equipment to the most ground-breaking technology imaginable, every new project brings outstanding possibilities and challenges, and we’ll ensure you’re equipped to succeed, with extensive training and development opportunities.

You will be working alongside a diverse team as our Directorate consists of Civil Servants, military colleagues and contractors, working closely to deliver the Army’s Modernisation Agenda ensuring the successful delivery of the programme through each of its critical stages.

This position is advertised at 37 hours per week.

Job description

This is an exciting time to join the Directorate as we seek to employ Project Delivery professionals to enhance our Project Delivery teams. We're looking for organised, motivated and dynamic individuals to support the delivery of our pivotal Programmes. You’ll be working alongside experienced colleagues making a significant contribution to Defence and the Nation.

In return, we offer the opportunity to further professionalise your experience through relevant training and/or accreditation.

This campaign has been designed to attract candidates who hold Portfolio, Programme & Project Management (P3M) experience, and are looking to further develop their skills and competence in this area. If you meet the following criteria, we would like to hear from you;

• Experience of working in a Project/Programme team, and have knowledge of project management practices, methodologies, tools, and techniques including planning, risk management, governance, frameworks, stakeholder management, change control and assurance.
• Role model behaviour; inspiring and leading team members effectively.
• Ability to clearly communicate messages to colleagues and stakeholders, overcoming barriers and taking into consideration diversity of interest.
• Establish and develop productive relationships, bringing people together to benefit the project.
• Ability to interpret and analyse data to inform decision making.
• Application of new ideas and ways of working, encourage and support innovations from others and follow ideas through to implementation.
• Well organised and able to adapt to changing circumstances and adversity whilst remaining calm, reassuring others, and maintaining performance.
• Problem-solver, adapting the best solutions and present findings convincingly.

We will be looking to utilise a reserve list from this campaign. This means that high-calibre candidates will be contacted after the interview process to discuss similar opportunities in Army Programmes without the need to re-interview.

The Army Programmes Directorate is adopting a flexible approach to our workforce to ensure that project delivery priorities are met whilst maximising opportunities in support of skills development and wider career pathways. This means that successful candidates may be allocated flexibly across the Directorate aligning to priorities.

Person specification

The roles within this campaign provide input to our most critical Programmes, some of the main responsibilities include:

Project Management

• Lead the project and the associated team on a day-to-day basis.
• Responsible for driving and overseeing the delivery of the project, ensuring that objectives are clearly defined and achieved within the agreed time, cost and quality constraints.
• Pivotal in project governance and working with stakeholders, to ensure the agreed project outputs are delivered to enable benefits to be realised.

Planning

• Work with stakeholders to ensure all aspects of the project are defined.
• Provide clarity on key milestones to define what, when and how activities will be organised to ensure the outcomes of a project can be achieved, with the resources available.
• Lead on all planning aspects, including the development, updating and monitoring of plans and schedules.
• Identify tasks, activities, interdependencies and outputs, working with the wider team to track and monitor progress against the plan throughout the life of the project.

Governance & Reporting ­­­­­

• Manage and control governance activities to enable effective management and decision-making.
• Ensure timely, consistent, and accurate data collection, analysis and reporting on progress and delivery confidence.

Risk, Assurance, Issues, Dependencies, Opportunities (RAIDO)

• Proactively manage risks and issues facing the Project/Programme by co-ordinating the consistent identification, documentation, monitoring and reporting of risks and issues.
• Support the relevant risk or issue owners to identify and develop appropriate mitigation plans and escalate to the next level of management where appropriate.

Benefits

• Proactively identify, quantify, and track the realisation of benefits used to justify investment in the Project/Programme.
• Ensure that a ‘fit for purpose’ approach to benefits measurement and realisation is used to provide assurance that the benefits identified can be achieved.

Programme / Project Support Officer

• Responsible for covering a diverse range of activities to support the delivery of the Project/Programme objectives.
• Enable the smooth running of the Project/Programme by supporting and leading the team through the operation of project management processes, and the co-ordination of business management actions and activities on their behalf.

Portfolio Analyst

• Responsible for the oversight of a collection of Programmes/Projects that contribute to the delivery of departmental or business area objectives.
• Focus primarily on providing insight, information and support that strengthens portfolio governance to enable prioritisation decisions and effective allocation of resources across the portfolio.
• Ensure optimal delivery of departmental/business strategic objectives in line with government priorities through the analysis of a range of information sources and engagement with programme and project stakeholders and converting this into informed insights using appropriate reporting and visualisation methods.

Successful candidates are required to hold one or more of the following qualifications listed below at Practitioner level:

• APM Project Management Qualification (PMQ)
• Prince 2 Practitioner
• Management of Portfolios
• Managing Successful Programmes
• PMI Project Management Professional
• Agile Project Manager Practitioner
• Or equivalent qualifications

To carry out the entirety of this role you must be able to achieve full Security Clearance (SC without any caveats). For further information about security vetting please search UKSV on GOV.UK

Qualifications

Successful candidates are required to hold one or more of the following qualifications listed below at Practitioner level:
•APM Project M