Director of IT Digital Programmes

The role

The University of Bristol is currently recruiting for a new Director of IT Digital Programmes. Playing a key role as part of the IT Senior Leadership team, the role has responsibility for leadership and delivery of a circa £100m digital change portfolio centred around the University’s overarching digital transformation programme as part of our new digital strategy. The strategy aims to transform the learning and research led experience of a near 70,000 users, some of whom are dispersed globally.

There are currently more than 50 projects in progress simultaneously, with a further 400 in the pipeline. Right now, our key in-flight projects cover delivery of a new modern network, a full re-work of identity and access management and its principles, a major cloud migration, a new Business Intelligence platform and the underlying data architecture, and major technology implementations that underpin the bleeding edge research housed in our Bristol Digital Futures Institute.

You’ll be responsible for defining the criteria for the control and management of all change work streams, ensuring the appropriate project management frameworks are in place. You will create capacity and capability to deliver all IT programmes, projects, technical architecture, and organisational technical change across the University.

What will you be doing?

The Director of IT Digital Programmes will be responsible for the development of a comprehensive and externally auditable executive summary framework that provides accurate and transparent reporting of the portfolio’s progress to milestones. This will include financial performance measures, strategic risks and issues, high-level resource allocation and other strategic KPIs required.

You’ll manage our strategic IT programme, co-ordinating and directing end user input and value management strategy. You will contribute to business cases in partnership with senior professional colleagues for major new initiatives to deliver innovation in the University’s systems, processes and services.

As a key part of the IT senior management team, this role holds shared leadership responsibility to deliver the IT department’s transformation programme, creating team structures, governance processes and value propositions that support the department’s transition to a new IT operating model.

Other aspects of the role will include-

• Responsibility for overarching portfolio resource planning across permanent, fixed term and contractor staffing to ensure the IT programme delivery capability is effectively resourced.
• Responsibility for the full financial control, both operational and capital expenditure budgets, and benefit realisation of the IT capital programme.
• Aligning of all IT programmes to assist the successful delivery of other University strategic objectives.
• Influence and inform the development and delivery of the University-wide IT digital strategy through membership of University Programme & Investment Boards, and other senior-level University committees.
• Establish and promote best practice across the IT operating model. Focus on programme & project management delivery methodology to drive efficiency and early benefit realisation across the University.

You should apply if

We’d love to hear from individuals who can demonstrate these things:

• You have extensive senior level leadership experience of demonstrable evidence of delivering complex change through large teams.
• Experience of leading and delivering high value and strategic technical programmes across multi-disciplined, diverse, and distributed technical and non-technical environments.
• You have experience of managing and controlling investment plans including substantial (£50m+) capital and operational budgets as well as developing and delivering against strategic and operational delivery plans.
• A strong people leader who can talk us through their management principles - you’ll often need to manage work through people outside of the change environment, while getting the absolute maximum out of the portfolio teams.
• Gravitas – extremely well honed stakeholder management ability with people of all levels of an organisation, both technical and non-technical.

Additional information

For any informal enquiries please contact Keith Woolley, Chief Information Officer, keith.woolley@bristol.ac.uk

Available documents

• Further Particulars (IT Services).pdf
• SUPP108480 Director of IT Digital Programmes JD.pdf