Retail PMO Lead

 Retail PMO Lead
Contract: 3 Months Initial Contract (Potential to Extend) Day Rate: £500–£600 per day (Inside IR35) Location: Waterloo, London (Hybrid – 2-3 days per week onsite)Overview
We are supporting one of the UK's leading retail organisations through a significant transformation portfolio and are seeking an experienced Retail PMO Lead to provide governance, oversight and assurance across multiple business change initiatives.This role will establish a dedicated Retail PMO capability, ensuring that all projects impacting stores, colleagues, customers and retail operations are appropriately assessed, governed and delivered successfully.This is not a project delivery role; it is a portfolio-level PMO and assurance position. The successful candidate will provide visibility across the transformation roadmap, identify retail impacts, manage risks and ensure the wider retail function is prepared for upcoming change.Candidates will need a strong retail background, ideally with experience working within retail operations, store environments, retail technology or large-scale transformation programmes affecting frontline teams.
Key Responsibilities
Retail Impact Identification & Portfolio Oversight

Maintain a live view of all active and planned projects impacting retail operations.Identify, assess and classify retail impacts across technology, processes, colleague experience, customer experience and trading activity.Work with project teams to ensure retail impacts are understood early and appropriately managed.Escalate key risks, dependencies and potential operational impacts to senior stakeholders.Support the integration of retail impact assessments into wider portfolio governance processes.
Retail Readiness & Change Assurance

Lead structured retail impact assessments for projects entering delivery and go-live phases.Define and track retail readiness criteria to ensure stores and operational teams are prepared for change.Challenge project teams where retail impacts have not been sufficiently considered.Identify risks around deployment timelines, operational capacity and potential disruption to trading performance.
Stakeholder Management & Communication

Act as the key point of contact between Portfolio Delivery teams and Retail leadership.Provide a consolidated view of upcoming change, dependencies, risks and delivery timelines.Develop and maintain a Retail Change Calendar to improve visibility across impacted teams.Support Steering Committees and governance forums where retail input is required.
Governance & Reporting

Own the Retail PMO risk and issue log, ensuring risks affecting stores and colleagues are tracked and managed.Provide retail impact assessments to support change approvals and governance decisions.Produce clear reporting and insights for senior stakeholders.Ensure consistent governance standards are applied across transformation activity.
Continuous Improvement

Identify opportunities to improve how retail change is planned, sequenced and delivered.Recommend improvements to portfolio governance, processes and ways of working.Support annual planning activities by providing insight into retail capacity, demand and change impact.

Essential Skills & Experience

Proven experience working within a PMO, Portfolio PMO or Programme Assurance role.Previous experience supporting large-scale transformation programmes within a retail environment.Strong understanding of retail operations, store environments and the impact of change on frontline teams.Experience managing governance frameworks including:

Change controlSteering CommitteesPortfolio reportingRisk and issue managementInvestment governance
Strong stakeholder management skills, with experience engaging senior business leaders.Ability to analyse complex information and translate it into clear risks, actions and recommendations.Comfortable challenging project teams and influencing decisions without direct authority.Experience operating in complex, fast-paced and cross-functional environments.

Desirable Experience

Experience using portfolio management tools such as Planview or similar platforms.Experience supporting retail technology, store transformation or customer-facing change programmes.PMO / Project Management certifications such as P3O, MSP or PRINCE2.