Location: London or Hinxton, Cambridgeshire
Salary: £120 000 to £135 000
Role Purpose
The Director of Portfolio & Performance owns the critical core of the company translating strategy into a cohesive suite of deliverable plans; ensuring individual projects delivered through a decentralised model contribute to a single vision Target Operating Model, and are greater than the sum of their parts.
The role will also be responsible for optimising and monitoring performance against them and taking action to bring delivery on track where necessary, advancing our ambition to improve patient outcomes. The role includes development and ownership of (i) the long, medium and short term delivery roadmap, including intervening when this is off track, (ii) the company planning cycle, (iii) the infrastructure needed to measure performance and benefits realisation across project, programme and live service activity, and (iv) the central professional hub for delivery leads who work across the company.
The role will work closely with the CEO, COO and wider C-suite as well as the Director of Strategy to ensure strategic thinking and delivery are considered side by side and work together to support HDRS in achieving its overarching goals and effectively develop the company’s target operating model.
Key Accountabilities
Strategic Leadership & Stakeholder Engagement
- Lead HDRS’ delivery and planning strategy, working with the Director of Strategy to set the company’s 5, 3 and 1 year roadmaps to ensure interdependencies, risks, and capacity is understood and actioned at the company level.
- Set the principles of delivery within HDRS balancing different methodologies to set out how HDRS should deliver to achieve its goals and working closely with partners and collaborators do deliver against shared goals.
- Shape and deliver a hub and spoke delivery model across HDRS, acting as a profession lead for delivery within the company whilst supporting the effective deployment of delivery resources across HDRS.
- Act as a senior member of the HDRS leadership team, contributing to organisational strategy and decision-making, communicating the benefits and threats to them.
Portfolio
- Design and run HDRS’s portfolio management framework, including governance, stage gates, prioritisation criteria and reporting standards, proportionate to a growing organisation. Ensuring throughout the portfolio aligns with the company’s strategic vision.
- Maintain a single, cross-company view of all projects, programmes, projects and live services: scope, dependencies, resourcing, spend, benefits and threats to achieving them. Surface risks and issues early and drive corrective action.
- Drive quality by embedding consistent delivery practice and tooling across teams, meeting public sector assurance expectations (e.g. IPA, Managing Public Money) while keeping delivery agile.
Planning
- Lead development of the company delivery plan and annual business plan, translating strategy into clear priorities, milestones, owners and resource requirements.
- Design and run the annual and in-year planning cycle, integrated with budgeting, workforce planning and the sponsor’s funding and spending review timetables.
- Ensure plans link directly to KPIs, OKRs and portfolio governance, so that progress against the plan is tracked and reported through a single, frictionless, joined-up system.
- Lead in-year re-planning and scenario planning as priorities, funding or external conditions change.
Performance
- Define and maintain HDRS’s performance framework, setting relevant KPIs and management information (MI) that link organisational objectives to team-level delivery and sponsor commitments.
- Design and implement systems and data pipelines that automate KPI and MI collection, reducing manual reporting and giving leaders timely, reliable dashboards.
- Own and facilitate the OKR process, including setting, cascading, regular check-ins and quarterly reviews, so that objectives are ambitious, aligned and outcome-focused.
- Set the company’s methodology for tracking benefits to ensure the organisation is able to evidence return on investment for the public.
- Produce high-quality performance reporting and advice for the Executive, Board and sponsors, including sponsor quarterly reviews and annual reporting requirements.
Risk Management
- Working with the COO, General Counsel and other senior leaders, design and embed HDRS’s enterprise risk management framework, aligned to HM Treasury’s Orange Book and Board-approved risk appetite.
- Own the corporate risks and issues register and risk reporting to the Executive, Board and Audit and Risk Assurance Committee. Make sure significant risks and issues are well understood, owned and actively mitigated. Where relevant, risks and issues should be linked to relevant entries on the benefits plan, ensuring the business has a clear sense of the threats to realisation of outcomes, benefits and investment objectives.
- Build risk management into everyday business so that risk and issue identification, escalation and mitigation are a routine part of portfolio, programme and operational management rather than a compliance exercise.
- Support a strong assurance culture, working with internal audit and other assurance providers to maintain a coherent view of control effectiveness across the organisation.
Health Economics – Dependent on Expertise
- Lead and develop a small health economics function that provides expert analysis across the organisation.
- Support the development of robust business cases (including Green Book five-case model and value-for-money assessments) for internal investment decisions and for sponsors and funders.
- Oversee economic evaluation, benefits modelling and impact assessment to demonstrate the value of HDRS’s services to the research community, the NHS and the wider life sciences sector.
- Make sure economic evidence informs strategy, prioritisation, pricing and external engagement, and build links with academic and government health economics communities.