Head of Strategy and Portfolio

Key Responsibilities

What you will do:

• Lead CustomerFirst strategy - You will help shape and refresh the CustomerFirst strategy as we learn from delivery. You will ensure we are on track to meet our objectives, identify where the value proposition needs to shift and create the conditions for senior leaders to make clear decisions. You will support the development of the pipeline and strong relationships with other government departments. You will also be responsible for connecting our work to pioneering transformation programmes across government, including the Future Civil Service programme.
• Own portfolio oversight - You will lead oversight of the full CustomerFirst portfolio, including governance, finance, priorities, dependencies, risk and reporting. You will ensure leaders have the right information at the right moment, without creating bureaucracy for its own sake. You will work closely with colleagues to ensure a healthy pipeline of activity, and resource allocated to this work.
• Drive monitoring, evaluation and learning - You will ensure CF is taking a robust approach to monitoring and evaluation across CustomerFirst, supported by GDS analysts. This includes ensuring we build a clear evidence base, tracking progress against objectives and leading the mid-point review that will inform future decisions about the programme.
• Build the NewCo toolkit and knowledge base - You will work with delivery teams, GDS, i.AI and wider partners to capture lessons from CustomerFirst projects. You will help turn those lessons into practical products, playbooks and toolkits that can be reused across government.
• Support policy leadership across the portfolio - You will support policy professionals embedded in CustomerFirst projects, helping surface policy choices early and making sure barriers, dependencies and trade-offs are brought into senior conversations at the right time.
• Lead a small, high-performing strategy and portfolio function - You will build the operating rhythm for the function and lead both directly and through influence. You will create clarity in ambiguity, uphold standards and support a culture where people can do their best work at pace.

As a line manager, you will be responsible for working with your members of staff to define their objectives, as well as managing their development and performance.

Essential Criteria

• Experience leading complex strategy, portfolio, transformation or business management work.
• Strong judgement in ambiguous environments, with the confidence to create clarity where there is no obvious answer.
• Experience advising senior leaders and turning complex information into decisions.
• Strong financial management, planning or resource prioritisation skills.
• Experience building governance, performance or reporting systems that improve decision making rather than slow people down.
• Ability to surface tensions, challenge constructively and push senior colleagues towards clear choices.
• Strong leadership and management skills, including direct and matrix management, that prizes inclusion, performance management and development.

Desirable Criteria

You Will Be Brilliant In This Role If You

• Can see the whole chessboard, not just one project.
• Love collaborating and creating connections - you don’t tolerate silos.
• Are comfortable saying “this is the trade-off” in a room of senior people.
• Prefer useful evidence over perfect slides.
• Can create order without creating unnecessary process.
• Know when to hold the line and when to adapt as evidence changes.
• Care about outcomes, public value and the practical details of delivery.
• Invest the team around you, championing the team’s culture, diversity and inclusion.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Communicating and Influencing
• Delivering at Pace
• Leadership
• Seeing the Big Picture

Salary and Benefits

Alongside your salary of £69,675, Department for Science, Innovation & Technology contributes £20,184 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology offers a competitive mix of benefits including:

• A culture of flexible working, such as job sharing, homeworking and compressed hours.
• Automatic enrolment into the Civil Service Pension Scheme, with an employer contribution of 28.97%.
• A minimum of 25 days of paid annual leave, increasing by 1 day per year up to a maximum of 30.
• An extensive range of learning & professional development opportunities, which all staff are actively encouraged to pursue.
• Access to a range of retail, travel and lifestyle employee discounts.

Office attendance

The Department operates a discretionary hybrid working policy, which provides for a combination of working hours from your place of work and from your home in the UK. The current expectation for staff is to attend the office or non-home based location for 40-60% of the time over the accounting period.

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours and Experience.

As part of the application process you will be asked to complete a CV and personal statement. Further details around what this will entail are listed on the application form.

In the event of a large number of applicants, applications will be sifted on the personal statement only.

The interview will consist of behaviour questions.

Interviewees will be asked to deliver a presentation; further details will be provided nearer the time.

Sift and interview dates to be confirmed.

Further Information

Former DSIT recruitment campaigns are continuing as usual, but candidates should be aware that following the Government’s announcement on the changes to some civil service departments, roles will be subject to the machinery of government moves and will ultimately be in one of the new departments. We will provide more information if you are selected for a role. This work remains of high importance to the civil service, and we thank you for your continued interest.

Reasonable Adjustment

We are proud to be a disability confident leader and we welcome applications from disabled candidates and candidates with long-term conditions.

Information about the Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) and some examples of adjustments that we offer to disabled candidates and candidates with long-term health conditions