PMO Lead

About Columbia Threadneedle Investments

What working at Columbia Threadneedle offers....

Working at Columbia Threadneedle Investments you'll find the promise we make to our clients is the same one we make to our employees: Your success is our priority.

Here, you'll find growth and career opportunities across all of our businesses. We're intentionally built to help you succeed. Our reach is expansive with a global team of 2,000 people working together. Our expertise is diverse with more than 450 investment professionals sharing global perspectives across all major asset classes and markets. Our clients have access to a broad array of investment strategies, and we have the capability to create bespoke solutions matched to clients' specific requirements.

Job Purpose Statement

Where you'll fit in & what our team goals are...

Support the programme mgr with the Client Experience programme to help monitor project performance against agreed targets (plan, financial performance, governance and change controls, risk and issue mgmt.) In addition the PMO Lead will help support implementation of strategic changes to core processes resulting from the ongoing implementation of a business change capability within CTI. Some specific areas of focus will include financial mgmt. including 3rd party vendor support and assisting with deployment & upskilling of core team members with best practice PM process.

Role Responsibilities

How you'll spend your time...

1. Provide support to the Client Experience programme and associated business leads. Support the delivery of large and complex business projects that are often cross-organizational initiatives in support of strategic objectives. Ensures that all projects are managed within the company's project delivery assurance framework and quality measures. Key role will be to help provide analytics across all project plans and business cases to monitor current status of delivering business benefits through capability delivery from the projects. Expected to be comfortable understanding programmes and associated financial business cases up to £20m.

2. Provide direct support to up to 4 project managers to ensure that all expectations are met around the project reporting cycle. A key aspect of this will not just be to ensure that PMs are on top of plans, dependency logs, financials, risks and issues, change requests, but are also providing analytics up to the programme mgr so that context is provided around thematics that are impacting the portfolio. Additional support will be needed to raise quality levels of reporting ensuring that messaging is crisp, concise and precise and related to business drivers and outcomes.

3. Assist with implementation of the new operating model for Business Change into the Distribution and Marketing change portfolio a.k.a Client Experience. This will include liaising with all stakeholder groups including Technology, Data, Operations, Risk, 3rd parties for implementing changes around WoW (Ways of Working) and implementing any changes to process. Particular focus in the initial phases will be around preparing programme financial monitoring based on new tooling and supporting the annual budgeting cycle. A direct responsibility will be to ensure that all key controls for change are embedded within the change programme, working closely with PMs to monitor dates for controls testing and evidencing. These will then be supplied into the steering committee at regular intervals in order that bi-annual RCSA attestions can be made by the Head of Change and Transformation.

4. Provide secretariat duties to the programme. This will include drafting of initial papers and providing guidance to the programme mgr and sponsors around decisions due and helping to pull together supporting information. Production of minutes and tracking all other in and outbound actions from other governance bodies such as the CPG and IEG will also be a major part of this role.

5. Onboarding and Business Mgmt. support - the role holder will be required to work with the Operations / Business Management areas of Change ensuring that there is efficient management of items that impact the functioning of the Client Experience programme. This will include monitoring of resourcing onboarding, liasion with GTC Ops and Tech for technology and facilities provision, developing suitable onboarding plans to assist with quick familiarisation of CTI people, tools, and practices for any new hires.

6. Leading key issues that require ownership & self-starting - this could include anything from a project financial deep dive to undertaking a programme wide check on resource plans against changes in business appetite (i.e support the programme mgr in simulation of upscaling / downscaling the tea, should budgets move).

Key Capabilities

To be successful in this role you will have...

- Expertise in utilizing industry-standard project management methodologies and tools that incorporates Capability Maturity Model (CMMi) methods.
- Solid demonstrable understanding of project accounting and how to develop business cases and then translate and monitor into project cost models and forecasts. Individual should understand clearly 3rd party P2P processes and how to reconcile a monthly ledger posting.
- Adept at standard office and project management applications such as Microsoft Office, Microsoft Project, Office 365 productivity tools, Teams applications particularly planning and project channel related .
- Demonstrated experience in supporting large-scale project initiatives to successful completion and implementation.
- Strong relationship building skills; highly effective communication skills that include ability to gain acceptance of others to a point of view.
- Ability to identify and provide support to resolve/mitigate issues or risks associated with projects.

Desired Capabilities

If you also had this, it would be great...

- Strong communication skills for helping to bring together critical data points to support decision making at senior level through governance