International Schools Partnership Limited
Demand & Delivery Lead (PMO)
London
Posted 2 days ago
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Demand & Delivery Lead (PMO)
ISP Demand & Delivery Lead (PMO) Role Profile
Purpose of the Role
The Demand & Delivery Lead is responsible for shaping, prioritising, and delivering the technology portfolio of change initiatives across the Group. This role blends strong delivery leadership with hands-on business analysis and light-weight PMO discipline to ensure demand is clearly understood, effectively prioritised, and delivered pragmatically against Group priorities.
The role acts as the bridge between business stakeholders, technology teams, and delivery partners, translating demand into well-scoped, deliverable work while driving it successfully to completion using the most appropriate delivery approach.
Reports to: Head of Delivery & Portfolio
Key Responsibilities
Demand Management & Intake
- Act as the primary interface between business stakeholders and delivery teams, understanding, qualifying, shaping, and triaging demand.
- Clarify problems, desired outcomes, priorities, constraints, dependencies, readiness levels, and success measures (not just the requested solutions).
- Translate requests into clearly defined initiatives, recommendations, or delivery plans, including options and trade-offs as necessary.
- Maintain a transparent view of demand (e.g., backlog/queue), capturing value, effort, risk, dependencies, and indicative timeframes.
- Support prioritisation by providing visibility into scope, assumptions, dependencies, risks, and effort, enabling clear "now / next / later" decisions.
Delivery Leadership
- Provide delivery leadership across assigned initiatives, ensuring work remains outcome-focused and well-governed.
- Define scope, objectives, milestones, delivery approach, sequencing, and success criteria, aligning to strategic priorities and architectural/operational constraints.
- Develop and maintain delivery plans, schedules, RAID logs, and resource profiles, ensuring dependencies and critical path items are explicit.
- Track progress, manage risks/issues, escalate and unblock when required, and implement corrective action to protect outcomes, time, cost, and quality.
- Offer additional delivery coordination or project management support when needed (without defaulting to ownership).
Business Analysis & Requirements
- Elicit, analyse, and document business requirements, ensuring clarity around outcomes, measures, and "definition of done".
- Translate business needs into functional and non-functional requirements, including impacts across process, data, technology, and operating model.
- Produce user stories, use cases, acceptance criteria, and supporting documentation to enable delivery and testing.
- Support UAT, readiness, and transition into operations, including adoption considerations (training, communications, ownership, support model).
- Identify opportunities for process improvement and simplification, ensuring recommendations are realistic within delivery constraints.
Stakeholder & Partner Management
- Develop strong working relationships with academic, operational, and technology stakeholders, acting as a bridge between strategy and execution.
- Facilitate workshops, working groups, and regular delivery updates, ensuring decisions, actions, and ownership are clear.
- Coordinate delivery activity across internal teams and external partners, managing handoffs, dependencies, and shared milestones.
- Manage expectations through clear, honest communication, including challenging assumptions and supporting trade-off decisions when priorities conflict.
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PMO, Governance & Reporting
- Apply proportionate PMO and portfolio practices to manage demand, delivery, and visibility (plans, RAID, dependencies, decision/action logs).
- Support portfolio prioritisation, sequencing, resource allocation, and capacity planning, including scenario views that highlight trade-offs.
- Contribute to financial tracking and budget alignment, including indicative costs, effort, and funding constraints.
- Support and/or run internal governance forums (e.g., portfolio prioritisation, tech leadership, COO/CFO check-ins, SteerCo), producing clear decision packets.
- Provide clear, concise reporting on status, forecast, risks, mitigations, dependencies, decisions required, benefits realisation/adoption progress, and progress toward adoption.
- Maintain delivery artefacts to agreed standards and support continuous improvement of ways of working and governance.
Skills
Must-Have
- Strong stakeholder management and relationship-building skills, capable of working confidently with senior leaders, regional teams, schools, and delivery partners.
- Excellent facilitation skills, able to lead workshops converting discussions into clear actions, ownership, and decisions.
- Clear, confident communication (written, verbal, and business-facing), transforming complex delivery topics into plain English for executive and board-level updates.
- Analytical, critical-thinking, and problem-solving capabilities, capable of converting ambiguous, early-stage requests into structured options, defined outcomes, and measurable success criteria.
- High attention to detail and organisation, particularly in managing portfolios, dependencies, and delivery risks across multiple initiatives.
- Practical project and delivery management skills, including planning, milestone tracking, RAID management, decision logs, and disciplined delivery reporting.
- Strong prioritisation, time management, and decision analytical skills to balance competing demands against strategic value, delivery capacity, and urgency.
- An adaptable, agile working style comfortable operating in ambiguity while introducing structure and forward progress where processes evolve.
Desired
- Experience in education, multi-site, or highly devolved organisations.
- Experience with platform technology (e.g., ERP/SIS/CRM), integrations, and data strategy (e.g., MDM, data platforms, unified profiles).
- Familiarity with portfolio governance tools (e.g., stage-gates, capacity planning, benefits tracking, RAID logs).
- Experience with external delivery partners or competency-based consultancies.
- Formal certifications in project, programme, or portfolio management (e.g., PRINCE2, MSP, Agile). Experience using portfolio/delivery tooling (e.g., Monday.com, Jira, Azure DevOps).
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Qualifications and Experience
Essential
- Demonstrable experience in portfolio, programme, demand, or delivery management within a large-scale organisation.
- Experience within or alongside technology, data, and business change teams, with sufficient insight to manage dependencies, sequencing, and delivery risks effectively.
- Ability to manage multiple initiatives concurrently, including prioritisation, delivery planning, and stakeholder alignment.
- Governance experience (e.g., participation in portfolio forums, prioritisation sessions, investment reviews).
- Capability to align demand to delivery capacity with consideration for sequencing and trade-off scenarios.
- Hands-on experience providing project management support, even in environments where delivery leadership rests elsewhere.
- Executive reporting experience, including progress updates, risks, mitigations, decisions required, and next actions.
- Ability to influence and drive outcomes across stakeholders without direct line management authority.
Desirable
- Industry experience in education, multi-site, or highly devolved organizations.
- Technical familiarity with platforms like ERP/SIS/CRM and data strategy components.
- Portfolio Governance expertise (e.g., stage-gates, RAID/dependency mapping).
- Experience with external partners or management of third-party entities.
- Certifications in PRINCE2, MSP, or equivalent project/portfolio management frameworks.
ISP Commitment to Safeguarding, D&I, and Belonging
Safeguarding Principles
- All employees must prioritise the safeguarding and wellbeing of children and young people consistently.
- ISP requires all staff to undergo detailed vetting, including Criminal Background Checks and references, to ensure safe working conditions.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging
- ISP values diversity in its workforce, encouraging applicants from diverse professional, cultural, and personal backgrounds to apply. Zero discrimination policies ensure every applicant has equal opportunities.
Core Principles
- Begin with Our Children and Students: Our children and students are the heart of what we do. Their success drives our mission.
- Treat Everyone with Care and Respect: Professionalism and support for each other are embedded principles.
- Operate Effectively: Focus relentlessly on critical priorities with school policies guiding every process.
- Be Financially Responsible: Financial decisions prioritize student needs.
- Learn Continuously: Commitment to constant personal/professional development and innovation.
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Skills
Stakeholder Management
Business Analysis
Delivery Leadership
Project Management
Communication
Analytical Skills
Problem Solving
Facilitation
Prioritization
Time Management
Governance
Reporting
Agile Methodologies
Process Improvement
Risk Management
Team Coordination
Location