Demand & Delivery Lead - PMO

Job Description

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 from across the Group. The role combines strong delivery leadership with hands‑on business analysis capability and light‑weight PMO discipline to ensure demand is well understood, prioritised effectively, 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 and driving it through to completion using the most appropriate delivery approach.

Reports to:  Head of Delivery & Portfolio   

ISP Key Responsibilities

Demand Management & Intake

• Act as a primary interface between business stakeholders and delivery teams to understand, qualify, shape, and triage demand.
• Clarify problems, desired outcomes, priorities, constraints, dependencies, readiness, and success measures (not just the requested solution).
• Translate requests into clearly defined initiatives, recommendations, or delivery plans, including options and trade-offs where appropriate.
• Maintain a transparent view of demand (e.g., backlog/queue), capturing value, effort, risk, dependencies, and indicative timeframes.
• Support prioritisation by providing visibility of scope, assumptions, dependencies, risks, and effort, and enabling clear “now / next / later” decisions.

Delivery Leadership

• Provide delivery leadership across assigned initiatives, from initiation through implementation and closure, ensuring work remains outcome-focused and appropriately 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 where required, and take corrective action to protect outcomes, time, cost, and quality.
• Step in with targeted delivery coordination or project management where additional structure, pace, or cross-team alignment is needed (without owning every delivery by default).

Business Analysis & Requirements

• Elicit, analyse, and document business requirements using appropriate techniques, ensuring clarity on outcomes, measures, and “definition of done.”
• Translate business needs into clear 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 operation, including adoption considerations (training, comms, ownership, support model) as required.
• Identify opportunities for process improvement and simplification, and ensure recommendations are realistic within delivery constraints.

Stakeholder & Partner Management

• Build 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.

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 make trade-offs explicit.
• Contribute to financial tracking and budget alignment where required, including indicative cost/effort and funding constraints.
• Support and/or run internal governance forums (e.g., portfolio prioritisation, tech leadership, COO/CFO check-ins, SteerCo), producing clear packs and decision points.
• Provide clear, concise reporting on status, forecast, risks, mitigations, dependencies, decisions required, and (where applicable) benefits realisation/adoption progress.
• Maintain delivery artefacts to agreed standards and support continuous improvement of ways of working and governance.

Skills

• Strong stakeholder management and relationship-building skills, able to work confidently with senior leaders, regional teams, schools, and delivery partners to build alignment and momentum.
• Excellent facilitation skills, able to lead workshops and working sessions that move groups from discussion to clear actions, owners, and decisions.
• Clear, confident communication (written, verbal, and business-facing), with the ability to translate complex delivery topics into plain English updates and recommendations for executive and board-level audiences.
• Strong analytical, critical thinking, and problem‑solving capability, able to turn ambiguous or early-stage requests into structured options, defined outcomes, and measurable success criteria.
• High attention to detail and strong 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-support skills, able to balance competing demands against strategic value, delivery capacity, and urgency.
• Adaptable and agile working style, comfortable operating in ambiguity and bringing structure, clarity, and forward progress where processes are still maturing.
• Results-oriented mindset, focused on delivery outcomes, follow-through, and ensuring work translates into tangible improvements and value.
• Comfortable using delivery tooling (e.g., Monday.com) to manage plans, status reporting, actions, and dependencies transparently.

Qualifications and Experience

Essential

• Demonstrable experience in portfolio, programme, demand, or delivery management within a complex organisation.
• Experience working in or alongside technology, data, and business change teams, with enough understanding to manage dependencies, sequencing, and delivery risk effectively.
• Track record of managing multiple initiatives concurrently, including prioritisation, delivery planning, and stakeholder alignment.
• Experience supporting or running governance cadences (e.g., portfolio forums, prioritisation sessions, or investment reviews), including producing decision packs and executive reporting.
• Experience aligning demand to delivery capacity and constraints, including sequencing and trade-off recommendations.
• Hands‑on experience providing project management support to initiatives, even where delivery is led by others.
• Experience producing clear executive-level reporting, including progress updates, risks, mitigations, decisions required, and next actions.
• Demonstrable ability to influence and drive outcomes across stakeholders without direct line management authority.

Desirable

• Experience in education, multi-site, or highly devolved organisations.

• Familiarity with one or more of the following (depending on portfolio scope):
  • Core platforms and applications (ERP/SIS/CRM or equivalent), including integrations
  • Integration and automation patterns (APIs, iPaaS, workflow, identity/access)
  • Data strategy components (e.g. MDM, data platforms/lakehouse, unified profiles, reporting/insight)
• Experience with portfolio governance tools and ways of working (e.g. RAID, stage-gates, capacity planning, benefits tracking).
• Experience working with external delivery partners or consultancies.
• Formal qualification or training in project, programme, or portfolio management (e.g. PRINCE2, MSP, Agile, or equivalent).
• Experience with portfolio/delivery tooling (e.g., Monday.com and/or Jira/Azure DevOps; reporting dashboards such as Power BI).

ISP Principles

Begin with our children and students. Our children and students are at the heart of what we do. Simply, their success is our success. Wellbeing and safety are both essential for learners and learning. Therefore, we are consistent in identifying potential safeguarding

and Health & Safety issues and acting and following up on all concerns appropriately.

Treat everyone with care and respect. We look after one another, embrace similarities and differences and promote the well-being of self and others.

Operate effectively. We focus relentlessly on the things that are most important and will make the most difference. We apply school policies and procedures and embody the shared ideas of our community.

Are financially responsible. We make financial choices carefully based on the needs of the children, students and our schools.

Learn continuously. Getting better is what drives us. We positively engage with personal and professional development and school improvement.

ISP Commitment to Safeguarding Principles

ISP is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people and expects all staff and volunteers to share this commitment. All post holders are subject to appropriate vetting procedures, including an online due diligence search, references and satisfactory Criminal Background Checks or equivalent covering the previous 10 years’ employment history.

ISP Commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging

ISP is committed to strengthening our inclusive culture by identifying, hiring, developing, and retaining high-performing teammates regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender expression, age, disability status, neurodivergence, socio-economic background or other demographic characteristics. Candidates who share our vision and principles and are interested in contributing to the success of ISP through this role are strongly encouraged to apply.