Animal and Plant Health Agency
Senior Project Support Officer
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Project Support Officer Lead (Senior) – Two Available Roles
(1 x Permanent | 1 x 18-month Fixed Term/Appointment)
Are you a proactive project leader who thrives in delivering complex portfolios with precision and influence? Does the opportunity to shape senior decision-making, embed best practice, and drive high-quality outcomes across Portfolio Management, Borders and Trade, and Policy/Programme Delivery excite you?
At the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA), we’re looking for two Senior Project Support Officers to fulfil pivotal roles in our Central Portfolio Management Office (CPMO) and Borders and Trade Programme.
APHA, above all, is a genuine and inclusive workplace: safe, supportive, and fiercely committed to building a diverse culture. We offer flexible working arrangements (full-time, part-time, job share, fixed-term) and empower every team member to contribute boldly.
About the Roles
Both positions span a dynamic intersection between operational portfolio coordination, leadership accountability, and change enablement. Your unique strength lies in bridging strategy with practical delivery, leveraging institutional expertise to enhance programme outcomes through skillful governance, reporting, and stakeholder support.
Key functions overlap across the roles, but you’ll lead within two specialised domains:
1. Central Portfolio Management Office (CPMO) (Permanent Appointment)
- The CPMO oversees standards, governance, reporting, and assurance across APHA’s Projects and Change Portfolio—the foundation of our organisations’ mission around the Sustainable Futures Strategy and broader transformation.
- Delivered through key programmes including:
- Borders and Trade (B&T)
- Priority Policy (PP)
- Digital & Operational Services (DOS)
- Delivering Sustainable Futures (DSF)
Your core responsibility: As Senior Project Support Officer in CPMO, you’ll:
- Provide long-term professional leadership and line management to Project Support Officers across the PP, DOS, and DSF programmes.
- Consolidate deliverability through consistent application of standards and reliable ways of working across the entire portfolio.
- Drive harmonisation of governance frameworks and reporting cycles, aligning with APHA, Defra, and Government expectations.
2. Borders and Trade Programme (Fixed Term for 18 Months)
- APHA’s Borders and Trade Programme supports preparation for future UK-EU Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreements, actively working on transformations to systems, processes, and practices to ensure compliant safe trade while preserving biosecurity.
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Your core responsibility: Under the direction of the Senior PMO Lead, you’ll:
- Ensure smooth delivery of large-scale change initiatives, with a focus on trade security and biosecurity compliance.
Responsibilities
Leadership and Management
- Define and champion collaborative standards, aligning sub-teams to shared high-performance objectives.
- Coach, mentor, and challenge individuals and communities to sustain excellence in increasingly complex portfolio contexts.
- Build policy-orientated influence—reporting confidently to senior stakeholders, escalating accurate risk analysis, and presenting rationale for decisions.
- Strategically negotiate capacity and priority—with an eye to mitigating delivery blind spots across disciplines.
Governance and Reporting
- Maintain end-to-end oversight of governance reporting cycles, ensuring alignment with APHA, Defra, and government standards.
- Enhance current PMO standards, processes, and templates to bolster portfolio quality, adopting best practice across all deliverables.
- Entirely own professional dashboards and reports, ensuring senior leaders receive clear, quantified, and timely insights to support informed, timely decisions.
Planning and Coordination
- Facilitate and coordinate multi-stakeholder delivery plans, articulating head-to-head trade-offs, renegotiating dependencies, and refining schedules high through detailed risk-based forecasting.
- Maintain a holistic portfolio baseline model—streamlined for resource visualisation and communication.
Stakeholder Engagement
- Be the single trusted interlink between programmes, projects, and governance, resolving escalations to sustain escalations while maintaining partner alignment and trust.
- Build cultural coherence through clear, consistent, and tailored progress reporting to all level of organisational hierarchy.
Continuous Improvement
- Champion digital transformation through process-modelled capability-building and agile knowledge-sharing.
- Scaling excellence: Enable structured lessons discipline, driving portfolio maturity.
Resource and Financial Governance
- Monitor and confirm resource accuracy across all allocated workstreams while informing strategic workforce optimisation recommendations.
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Risk, Issue and Dependency Governance
- Operate as shared risk and dependency manager, confirming proportional ownership and escalation and fostering a shared problem-solving community.
Requirements
This role demands individuals with spine-stiff execution skills, seasoned in cross-portfolio governance and delivery: a constructive, solutions-driven mindset that welcomes uncertainty as fuel—not a dysfunction.
Essential Competencies
- Portfolio/Project/Programme Management Experience: Clear track-record in delivering complex portfolios, ideally within PMO frameworks, supporting governance, reporting mechanisms or regulatory oversight.
- Leadership: Unwavering track-expanding leadership across teams-of-practice, rooting behaviours in role-model professionalism under pressure.
- Receptive Urgency: Ability to excel under tight deadlines with strategic early warnings to mitigate delivery risks.
- Analytical Clarity: No empty jargon; crystal-clear finance dashboards, reports, and plans for rigorous, responsive decision-making.
- Cross-Disciplinary Bridge: Deep trustworthiness with senior leaders and technical teams, skillfully distilling complex problems into actionable guidance.
Qualifications and Preferred Experience
- An accredited PMO qualification (e.g., APM Portfolio/ Programme Foundation/Professional Qualifications, PRINCE2, MSP, or MoP), or equivalent competence—the appetite to refresh or certify is encouraged.
- Native-level literacy in government-centric PMO standards, regulatory governance, and government delivery conventions.
Benefits and Offer
- Base Salary (£42,665) + when utilising the Civil Service Pension scheme, employer matches it £12,360.
- 25 paid annual leave days, progressing to 30.
- Tailored development at every stage of your career, pairing with the latest industry-thought-leadership.
- Flexible workforce culture—localized to meet your needs, with parts, whole, or flexible working.
- A trade discount blitz plus incentives, discounts and/sal cream lifestyle discounts.
Want more? Serious candidates can skip ahead directly on the Civil Service Job Profile Page.
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