Government Recruitment Service • SW1H 9AJ
About this role
Are you passionate about driving meaningful organisational change that improves services, strengthens ways of working, and delivers long‑term impact?Do you enjoy shaping complex transformation programmes, aligning diverse stakeholders, and turning strategic vision into tangible outcomes?Can you lead the planning, coordination and delivery of key transformational change across the organisation? Can you bring structure, insight and strong programme leadership to ensure initiatives are delivered on time, within scope and to a high standard?As a senior leader within the Delivery function, you are accountable for the successful delivery of the Transformation Programme, providing strategic direction, expert delivery leadership, and authoritative decision-making across this complex, multi-year programme of work.
You will ensure the programme aligns with the wider organisational strategy, government priorities, and GDS service standards.
You will lead multiple multidisciplinary workstreams—spanning digital, policy, operations, commercial, technical architecture, and data—ensuring high-quality, user-centred, and accessible services.
You will be accountable for programme governance, risk management, assurance, budget oversight, and stakeholder engagement at senior levels.
You will co-ordinate activities across these roles, ensuring effective resource, financial, supplier management and embed a culture of high-performance, innovation and continual improvement, throughout the programme of work.
Occasional out-of-hours delivery support may be required during major releases.
Key responsibilities
Strategic Programme Leadership Provide strategic leadership and set the direction across the transformation programme, ensuring alignment with organisational strategy and priorities and wider government priorities. Own the programme roadmap, milestones, dependencies, outcomes, and benefits realisation. Provide authoritative guidance to ELT members, senior leadership, and contribute to cross-government conversations where relevant.
Governance & Assurance. Establish and chair programme governance steering boards, and decision-making forums. Ensure programme controls are robust, high-quality, and meet departmental and GDS service assessment requirements through (Alpha, Beta, Live). Lead high-level reporting and Portfolio Board, Strategic Change Board, and senior leadership, demonstrating evidence-based recommendations. You will attend cross government Webinars and Annual Project Management conference.
Delivery Oversight & Prioritisation. Lead multiple agile delivery teams, ensuring clarity of priorities, resource utilisation, and inter-team integration thought the programme of work. Manage and resolve complex risks, issues, assumptions and dependencies across the programme
Senior Stakeholder Engagement. Act as primary programme contact for senior stakeholders across the digital, operational, policy, commercial and external partners. Build and sustain collaborative relationships, influencing decision-making, and managing expectations through clear and consistent communications.
Decision Making. Make timely and confident decisions, backed by credible evidence and assessment of risks, impacts, and trade-offs. Empower delivery teams to make operational decisions while retaining accountability for the strategic direction.
Problem Solving & Continuous Improvement. Identify root cause of complex delivery problems and coordinate multidisciplinary input to create actionable options. Promote learning, retrospectives and continuous improvement across programme leads.
Financial & Commercial Management. Oversee programme budgets including forecasting, financial controls, and benefits tracking. Work with the commercial team and manage external supplier performance, procurement, and contractual obligations.
People Leadership & Capability Development. Foster an inclusive, empowered and high-performing programme environment aligned with Civil Service behaviour standards. Build capability across the delivery teams and the wider organisation, coaching colleagues on the programme of work, the user-centred design, and risk management.
Proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme
Disability Confident
About Disability Confident
A Disability Confident employer will generally offer an interview to any applicant that declares they have a disability and meets the minimum criteria for the job as defined by the employer. It is important to note that in certain recruitment situations such as high-volume, seasonal and high-peak times, the employer may wish to limit the overall numbers of interviews offered to both disabled people and non-disabled people. For more details please go to Disability Confident.