Operational Data and Insight Manager

Job summary

Census 2031 represents our most ambitious data collection project yet – a once-in-a-decade opportunity to capture a complete picture of everyone living in England and Wales. Building on the digital success of 2021, we're pioneering new ways to reach every household and community, ensuring no one is left uncounted. This vital work will provide the foundation for policy decisions, resource allocation, and community planning for the next decade.

Your work will support delivery of this transformational project that will shape how we understand and support our nation's future. You’ll be part of a team that ensures everyone is counted—and every voice is heard. We're building a culture that values collaboration, fresh thinking, and respect for diverse expertise. Whether you're a seasoned professional or bringing new perspectives, you'll be part of a team that welcomes bold ideas, works transparently, and thrives on solving complex challenges together.

This role sits within Census Service Delivery & Operations division and plays a key part in shaping the delivery and performance of Census services.

As an operational support manager you will work with a diverse range of stakeholders, coordinating activities across multiple workstreams to ensure successful delivery. You will be responsible for helping to establish policies and procedures, ensuring that working practices including issue management are monitored and documented, making use of available information to inform work and drive performance and improvements to systems / services, and gather metrics for reporting and future improvement opportunities.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics. These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution, and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime, and migration.

Job description

As part of our Operational Management function, you'll play a key role in supporting the design, development and management of Census operational dashboards, management information, and reporting solutions. You'll help deliver timely, accurate and meaningful insights that support effective service delivery, operational performance, and informed decision-making across the organisation.

Working closely with operational teams, service managers and senior stakeholders, you'll analyse complex data and translate it into clear, actionable intelligence. You'll contribute to the development of advanced dashboards, reporting frameworks and analytical tools, ensuring stakeholders have access to the information they need to improve performance and support strategic planning.

You'll be part of a collaborative Business Intelligence team focused on continuous improvement and operational excellence. Working alongside the Business Intelligence Manager and multidisciplinary colleagues, you'll help monitor and enhance operational services and systems, using data-driven insights to identify opportunities, drive efficiencies and ensure processes remain effective, relevant and fit for purpose.

Key Responsibilities:

• Interpret Census operational data and apply Business Intelligence (BI) approaches to support service delivery, operational decision-making and continuous improvement, including through dashboards and data sets.
• Collate, transform and model data from multiple sources, seeking opportunities to innovate and improve the quality and efficiency of analysis and reporting.
• Produce, test and quality assure accurate and timely management information and BI products, to report Census operational and service performance, ensuring compliance with relevant policies, data governance and data protection requirements.
• Ask appropriate questions of the data and highlight trends, emerging issues and risks to support informed decision-making and intervention activity.
• Work as part of the BI function, establishing effective working relationships with Census service owners and operational stakeholders, contributing to regular discussions to understand emerging data and reporting needs.
• Undertake analysis to support the ongoing evaluation of the Census operation and provide analytical support to other Census services undertaking evaluation activity.
• Summarise and present analytical findings and management information clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

• Proven experience communicating and building relationships across teams to deliver excellent service, quality and performance.
• Ability to think analytically, using trends and insights from data to support decision-making and forecasts.
• Leads the development, design and commissioning of meaningful management information and dashboards (data outputs) to provide data and insights at pace to support service delivery and operational standards.
• Assures how data is used to drive decision making in a consistent way across the organisation.
• Is confident in weighing up competing data sets to ensure sound decision making across the organisation.

Behaviours

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

• Delivering at Pace
• Seeing the Big Picture
• Managing a Quality Service

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £34,587, Office for National Statistics contributes £10,019 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 culture.

Inclusion & Accessibility

At ONS we are always looking to attract the very best people from the widest possible talent pool, and we are proud to be an inclusive, equal opportunities employer. As a Disability Confident Leader we’re committed to ensuring that all candidates are treated fairly throughout the recruitment process.

As part of our application process, you will be prompted to provide details of any reasonable adjustments to our recruitment process that you need. If you would like to discuss any reasonable adjustments before applying, please contact the recruitment team in the first instance.

If you would like an accessible version of any of the attachments or recruitment documents below or linked to in this advert, please contact the recruitment team who will be happy to assist.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be wi