SC Cleared Readiness Manager (Category Manager) – Outside IR35

SC Cleared Readiness Manager (Category Manager) – Outside IR35       

Contract Term: 6 Months

Contracting Authority: Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office

Location: Full Remote Working – Ad hoc attendance to local office (Various Locations)

Clearance: Active SC Clearance is essential

The Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the Department for International Development (DfID) merged on 1 September 2020 to form the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO).

The FCDO pursues our national interests and projects the UK as a force for good in the world. We promote the interests of British citizens, safeguard the UK's security, defend our values, reduce poverty and tackle global challenges with our international partners.

Imagine having a talent that could benefit someone you’ve never met and solve problems you didn’t even know existed. Well, you do, and you can. And we’re here to help you do just that. At PSR we are the go-to place for talented contractors and temps for a rich variety of public sector roles.

As a SC Cleared Readiness Manager (Category Manager), your main responsibilities would be: 

• Responsible for successful planning, co-ordination, tracking, reporting and delivery of/against a cohesive readiness plan for UAT, Transition & Cutover, and Early Life Support to meet key business and programme milestones. Applies to each major release.
• Drives confidence and conviction across all stakeholders to go live.  A pro-active, confident, positive individual able to effectively manage expectations across a broad range of stakeholders (IT, business, service, suppliers, 3rd parties).
• Ensure delivery aligns to key milestones – especially major functional releases (R3/R5) and the business calendar of events.
• Drive an overall readiness level that meets the quality, risk and confidence profiles required by key stakeholders and decision makers.
• Ensure an effective approach to change management in achieving readiness for key gates and delivery milestones.
• Work with a wide range of stakeholders across business, programme and supplier teams to identify and resolve inter-relationship, dependency or contract issues where they are blockers for readiness (escalating as appropriate and using the approved governance processes and forums as required).
• Clearly articulate risk profiles and identify opportunities to manage to acceptable levels.  Effectively identify and manage risks and issues to ensure delivery is successful and escalate early when there are impacts to other projects, work streams or stakeholders. Facilitate, co-ordinate and drive issue and problem resolution and associated change management to ensure readiness for key milestones and gates.
• Effective collaboration with the wider programme team stakeholders, and business resources in a ‘mixed economy’ model to enable successful delivery of project deliverables and outcomes within agreed timescales and budgets.  
• Provide input to the broader Operating Model [OMOD] work stream regarding impacts and implications of readiness related decisions and delivery approaches e.g. business impacts and impacts to transition, cut-over and early life support activities.
• Production of quality, timely, pertinent ‘good practice’ project management products and controls e.g. project plans, RAIDO logs, reporting.
• Good communicator, team player and ability to manage set activities to agreed timescales.
• Project Manager focused with speciality in Readiness
• Working closely with planning to resolve blockers

You’ll have relevant experience in:

• Evidence of successful delivery of programmes and/or projects, in a complex change environment, relating to technology implementation and transition and related business change programmes
• Achieving planned work on time and budget
• Plan management, dependency management and change management
• Evidence of the ability to understand and work effectively in a complex environment
• Delivering operational change (especially related to IT management e.g. service management, supplier management, operational governance relating to the provision of services based on enterprise scale IT applications)
• Exemplary stakeholder engagement skills (positive attitude, listening, understanding, tact & diplomacy, negotiation, facilitation, support, professional communication, resilience & perseverance)
• Problem solving
• Ability to analyse a broad data set and identify critical and priority actions
• Experience in public sector
• Willingness to apply for and undergo DV clearance
• Background in programmes and projects

Desirable criteria:

• Managing projects related to transition to Cloud Applications
• IT vendor transition projects, SIAM implementation
• ERP/HCM application implementation
• HR/Finance related project experience

If this SC Cleared Readiness Manager (Category Manager) role sounds like something that you would be interested in, please click the link to apply and speak to one of our PSR team now.

"In applying for this role you acknowledge the following; this role falls in scope of the Off Payroll Working in the Public Sector legislation. Any rates of payment quoted will reflect the gross rate per day for the assignment, and will be subject to appropriate taxes and statutory costs. As such the payment to the intermediary and your income resulting from this contract will be different."