The Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment (The CISI)
Assistant Director - Future-Fit Transformation Programme
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Reports to: Chief People Officer, as Senior Responsible Owner (SRO) for the Future-Fit programme
Job level: Level 2
Contract type: Fixed-term contract, 18 months, full time
Location: City of London
Role Purpose:
CISI is implementing a future-fit target operating model. The implementation plan runs to more than four hundred change actions across seven workstreams, sequenced over roughly two years and interdependent with the separate Microsoft Dynamics programme, which is led on the client side by the Assistant Director - Dynamics Transformation Programme under a separate Senior Responsible Owner. The Future-Fit Transformation Programme Manager owns the delivery spine for the Future-Fit programme: a single credible Future-Fit plan, active dependency and risk management, disciplined governance reporting, and the operating rhythm that keeps accountable owners across the pillars delivering to it. This is a delivery leadership role rather than a design role. The high-level design is largely complete; the task now is to turn it into detail and action, hold the organisation to the sequence, and build the internal programme capability that will sustain the transformation once external support ends.
Key Accountabilities:
Plan and delivery control
- Own the Future-Fit implementation plan as the single source of truth across the Future-Fit workstreams, maintaining the baseline and controlling changes to it, and maintain a clear read-across to the Dynamics plan.
- Re-validate and re-baseline the current plan within the first eight weeks, testing owners, start and end dates, effort assumptions and acceptance criteria, and bringing a revised, deliverable plan to ExCo.
- Manage the dependency map actively, including the critical dependencies on Dynamics phase go-live dates, and re-sequence work where dependencies move.
- Track progress against milestones and acceptance criteria, and intervene early where delivery is at risk.
Governance and reporting
- Run the Future-Fit programme governance cycle, contribute Future-Fit reporting into the Transformation Oversight Group at portfolio level, and prepare clear, decision-focused reporting for the SRO, ExCo, People and Remuneration Committee (PRC) and the Board.
- Maintain the programme risk and issue register, with credible mitigation owned by named individuals, and escalate promptly and proportionately.
- Prepare papers and recommendations that allow committees to make timely decisions, in CISI house style and to the standard expected by trustees.
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Cross-functional leadership
- Hold accountable owners and work package leads to their commitments through influence rather than line authority and resolve conflicts over capacity between transformation work and business as usual.
- Support the Senior Leadership Team to lead change in their own areas, coaching them into the role of change leaders rather than recipients.
- Work alongside incoming pillar Directors as they are appointed, integrating the design work they lead into the wider programme plan.
Programme office and capability building
- Work through the shared Transformation Office, which supports both programmes and does not report to either Programme Manager, to apply consistent standards, templates, reporting tools and a benefits tracking approach proportionate to CISI’s size.
- Build internal project and programme management capability through coaching, shadowing and structured knowledge transfer, so that delivery can be sustained internally.
- Manage the relationship and interface with external delivery partners engaged by the Future-Fit programme, including scope, quality and value for money.
Interface with the Dynamics programme
- Work with the AD Dynamics to maintain a joined-up view of the Future-Fit and Dynamics plans, so that business process design lands ahead of system go-live rather than after it.
- Work as a peer with the AD Dynamics to align milestones and dependencies, and surface slippage in either programme to both Senior Responsible Owners and ExCo early.
- Represent the Future-Fit programme in the agreed joint mechanism for cross-programme process, data and technology decisions, so that Future-Fit process design is reflected in Dynamics configuration and Dynamics constraints are reflected in Future-Fit design.
Essential Experience:
- Demonstrable track record of managing an organisation-wide transformation programme through implementation, not only through design, in an organisation of comparable or greater complexity.
- Experience of running a programme that combines organisational change with a major system implementation, and of managing the dependencies between them.
- Strong programme management discipline: planning, dependency management, risk and issue management, benefits tracking and re-baselining, applied pragmatically rather than bureaucratically.
- Experience of reporting to executive and non-executive audiences, including board or committee level, and of writing papers that support decisions.
- Evidence of delivering through influence in a matrix environment, holding senior colleagues to account without direct line authority.
- Experience of operating within a portfolio alongside a peer programme, including managing shared resource and cross-programme dependencies without direct authority over them.
- Experience of transferring capability to internal teams and of leaving a sustainable delivery model behind.
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Desirable Experience:
- Membership body, professional body, charity or regulated financial services environment.
- Multi-jurisdiction operations, particularly where delivery teams sit in more than one country and time zone.
- Formal programme management qualification, for example Managing Successful Programmes or equivalent, held lightly and applied proportionately.
- Experience of programmes running alongside organisational restructuring and workforce change
Core Competencies:
Commercial Awareness
Understands where the value in the transformation sits, protects the initiatives that deliver it, and makes proportionate calls on cost, scope and pace in a charitable context.
Communication
Writes and speaks with clarity for very different audiences, from a trustee paper to a work package lead who needs to know what is expected of them this week.
Collaboration
Builds credibility quickly across pillars and geographies, and works with incoming Directors as partners rather than as reporting lines.
Resilience
Holds the line on plan discipline under pressure, absorbs setbacks such as dependency slippage, and keeps momentum when the programme is contested.
Problem Solving
Cuts through a large and interdependent plan to identify what actually matters, and proposes practical routes through blockages rather than escalating them unresolved.
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