Change Manager

Job summary

Do you enjoy shaping change that delivers meaningful, long‑term benefits? Are you motivated by supporting people to navigate change with clarity, confidence, and purpose? If so, this role offers an excellent opportunity to make a real impact.

Business Surveys is going through a significant period of change as we continue to improve the way we design, deliver and support business survey operations. This role sits within Business Surveys Change team and will help ensure that change is well planned, clearly communicated and successfully embedded across teams, services and stakeholders.

The Change Manager plays a key role in preparing the organisation for the successful adoption of change, ensuring that new ways of working are understood, embedded, and deliver measurable benefits. Acting as the bridge between delivery teams and business users, you will support the planning and implementation of change to enable a smooth transition into business-as-usual.

Job description

As a Change Manager, you will play a key role in preparing the business for new ways of working, helping colleagues understand what is changing, why it matters and what support is needed to make the change successful. You will work closely with project teams, operational colleagues, subject matter experts and senior stakeholders to assess change impacts, support business readiness, develop engagement activity and contribute to benefits realisation.

You will help translate complex programme and project activity into practical plans that support adoption across Business Surveys. This will include developing and maintaining change plans, supporting communications, identifying risks and readiness issues, and making sure that people affected by change are engaged early and appropriately. The work will be varied and may involve supporting multiple change initiatives at different stages of the lifecycle, from planning through to implementation and embedding.

The successful candidate will be confident working in a busy and sometimes ambiguous environment, able to build trusted relationships and comfortable using evidence, insight and feedback to shape delivery. You will need to be organised, proactive and able to communicate clearly with different audiences, balancing structure and pace with the practical needs of teams delivering critical statistical outputs.

This is an opportunity to contribute to meaningful change in a high-profile area of ONS, supporting improvements that help Business Surveys continue to deliver trusted, high-quality data for decision makers, businesses and the public.

Key Responsibilities

• Leadership & Delivery - Leads business change activities and collaborates with the project team to achieve the benefits and outcomes outlined in the business case. Champions best practices and provides expert advice to team members and the project community. Assesses and understands the impact on stakeholders to enhance their adoption of the change.
• Business Case - Assists the Project Manager in preparing and updating the change management elements of the business case.
• Change Products - Supports the Project Manager in creating the required business change products. Leads engagement with key contacts and ensures products are fit for purpose.
• Change Planning - Establishes and maintains the change plan for a specific area of responsibility.
• Business Readiness - Identifies, qualifies, and updates business readiness criteria across areas of responsibility before implementation. Supports tracking to determine ‘approve/refuse’ for go-live decisions.
• Benefits Management - Supports the Benefits Manager, Project Manager, and stakeholders in identifying and leveraging benefits. Incorporates benefits management into all change activities.
• Change Communication - Works with the Stakeholder Manager and Project Manager to create and maintain a communications plan related to change messaging. Provides content for communications across areas of responsibility.
• Stakeholder Management - Identifies and classifies stakeholders, ensuring their inclusion in the stakeholder engagement plan. Serves as the point of contact for a larger pool of more senior stakeholders.
• Guidance & Support - Provides direction and guidance to the team. Leads change activities across areas of responsibility.
• Digital & Data - Collects and shares data in line with data standards. Uses digital tools to manage change initiatives effectively, ensuring that data analytics support the identification and tracking of change impacts and the adoption of new ways of working.

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

• Experience of leading or supporting business change or transformation activity, with an ability to understand business perspectives and align change activity to wider strategy.
• Practical experience of applying business change approaches, frameworks, methodologies or models to support successful implementation and adoption.
• Ability to assess the impact of change on people, processes, stakeholders and operational areas, using evidence and insight to support readiness, implementation and embedding.
• Experience of delivering work to agreed timelines managing competing priorities in a busy or changing environment.
• Ability to develop clear, creative and effective communications for different audiences, creating a strong narrative that supports understanding, engagement and adoption of change.
• Well-developed stakeholder management skills and experience of successfully building relationships and networks with a diverse range of people to achieve collaboration, develop common goals, and deliver significant business change outcomes.
• Ability to provide constructive challenge, guidance and support to colleagues and promote good change management practice.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Leadership
• Delivering at Pace
• Communicating and Influencing

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• Business Change and Implementation- Practitioner : Project Delivery Capability Framework
• Stakeholder Engagement- Working : Project Delivery Capability Framework

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £41,985, Office for National Statistics contributes £12,163 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

The Office for National Statistics is part of the Civil Service, and as such we share a number of key benefits with other departments, whilst also having our own unique offerings to support our valued colleagues across the organisation.

Whether you are hearing about us for the first time or already know a bit about our organisation, we hope that our careers site will give you a great insight into the benefits and facilities available to our colleagues, and our fantastic working cultu