The Open University
Assistant Director, Strategic Portfolio & Planning
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Assistant Director, Strategic Portfolio & Planning
Are you a strategic leader with the vision and influence to shape institutional priorities, investment decisions, and organisational performance?
Join The Open University as Assistant Director, Strategic Portfolio & Planning and play a pivotal role in ensuring the University has effective approaches to strategic prioritisation, planning, performance, and risk management. This is an opportunity to influence executive decision-making at the highest level and help drive the long-term success of one of the world's leading distance-learning institutions.
About the Role
The Assistant Director, Strategic Portfolio & Planning is accountable for ensuring the University has effective approaches to strategic prioritisation, planning, performance, and risk. The successful candidate will provide strong institutional leadership on how choices about the funding of strategic initiatives are framed, prioritised & evidenced, enabling effective executive and governance decision-making.
The role provides overall leadership of the team, holding accountability for collective performance, integration, coherence, and outputs, while Senior Managers within the team retain ownership and remain accountable for the substance, analysis, and professional judgement within their remits.
Key Responsibilities
- Strategic prioritisation and investment leadership: Lead the University’s strategic prioritisation and portfolio level investment processes, ensuring high-quality options, explicit trade-offs, and decision-ready recommendations for senior decision makers.
- Business planning and review: Lead the integrated business planning and review cycle, ensuring a clear line of sight between strategy, priorities, resources, and outcomes, and improving value while reducing unnecessary process burden.
- Performance and risk frameworks: Lead the design, continuous improvement, and effective use of performance and risk management frameworks so that insight actively informs executive oversight, prioritisation, and institutional learning.
- Integration and assurance across the strategic portfolio and planning team: Set direction and standards, join up planning, investment, performance, and risk, and provide quality assurance on high impact, cross-team outputs, acting as an integrator rather than gatekeeper.
- Team leadership and ways of working: Provide overall leadership of the team in a way that strengthens Senior Manager ownership and confidence, while avoiding unnecessary management layers.
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About You
Essential:
- Experience leading enterprise-level processes for the prioritisation of funding for strategic initiatives.
- Strong experience in strategic planning within a complex organisation.
- Proven ability to produce high-quality strategic analysis and materials for senior audiences.
- Excellent stakeholder engagement and credibility at senior levels.
- Strong coaching and people leadership capability, with experience developing team maturity and performance.
- Demonstrated ability to simplify processes and remove duplication.
- High integrity, resilience, and comfort operating with ambiguity.
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Desirable:
- Understanding of Higher Education or public sector strategy.
- Knowledge of performance and risk frameworks.
Why Join Us?
At The Open University, we're committed to transforming lives through accessible education and innovation. This is a unique opportunity to influence strategic direction at an institution with a global reputation, helping to ensure that resources, investment, performance, and risk are aligned to deliver our mission and ambitions.
Our benefits include:
- 33 days annual leave, on top of bank holidays and a three-day Christmas closure period.
- Access to a leading pension scheme for UK higher education with generous employer contributions.
- Staff Fee Waivers for OU study, meaning you could earn a degree for free.
- Hybrid working, with limited requirement to attend the office in-person, with agile working and family-friendly policies.
- Discounts, wellbeing support, and development opportunities.
Ready to make a lasting impact?
Apply now to help shape strategic decision-making, drive institutional performance, and influence the future direction of one of the UK's most respected institutions.
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