Project Manager

Join us as a Project Manager and lead the successful delivery of high-impact projects that shape the UK’s key economic and social insights.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics. These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution, and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime, and migration.

Working within the Portfolio Office of the Data Products Services, and Governance Directorate, you will be at the heart of coordinating projects that enable ONS to produce the official statistics that inform government policy and public understanding of society and the economy.

The Project Delivery Profession (PDP) leads and supports the delivery of some of the most complex and high-impact projects across government. With over 26,000 professionals managing programmes, portfolios and projects nationwide, the profession plays a vital role in implementing government policy and driving organisational change. 

As a member of the Project Delivery Profession, you will benefit from access to a strong community of practice, professional development opportunities, and shared learning that supports successful delivery. The profession provides expert guidance, tools and career pathways to help you build your skills and progress your career, while contributing to delivering real outcomes for the public.

Job description

As a Project Manager, you will be responsible for driving and overseeing the delivery of mutiple projects across the Portfolio to ensure objectives are clearly defined and achieved within agreed time, cost, and quality constraints. The Project Manager plays a key role in project governance and works with stakeholders to ensure agreed project outputs are delivered, enabling benefits to be realised.

Responsibilities

• Creates and leads the project to deliver agreed outcomes within time, cost, and quality constraints, providing day to day management, leadership, and effective project controls. 

• Providing effective leadership and management controls. 

• Designs the project establishes project controls, selecting appropriate delivery methodologies, and managing transitions between project phases.

• Delivers the benefits and outcomes stated in the business case, ensures a suitable benefits realisation strategy is in place and monitors long-term benefit delivery against the business case.

• Identifies and manages stakeholder relationships, ensuring necessary senior-level support. Manages internal and external relationships appropriately.

• Identifies and monitors project risks and issues, develops mitigating actions and escalates when necessary. Collaborates with related projects to Identifies and monitors project risks and issues, develops mitigating actions and escalates when necessary. Collaborates with related projects to manage inter-dependencies.

• Supports effective governance and decision-making. 

• Participates in assurance reviews and supports implementation of recommendations. 

• Organises assurance processes, such as gateway reviews, when required.

• Ensures change management processes are in place to agree on and document changes to deliverables with stakeholders.

• Offers support, guidance, and coaching to the wider team, shows commitment to personal development, and promotes effective team performance.

• Communicates the vision and translates it into delivery objectives for the portfolio. Develops and maintains the Project Plan, sets project controls, manages performance, and reports progress to director and boards.

These qualifications would be advantageous alongside proven experience delivering projects, however training will be available for the successful candidate.

• PRINCE2 Practitioner

• Agile Project Management Practitioner.

• APM Project Management Qualification.

• APM Chartered Project Professional.

• Project Leadership Programme.

• PMI Project Management Professional.

• Managing Projects and Leading Workstreams.

• Government Project Professional accreditation. 

Person specification

Essential Criteria

The successful candidate will have proven of experience of the following in a high complexity project/s: 

• Leading the successful delivery of projects within budget, time, quality and user expectations across the whole project life cycle, tailoring their approach and applying the appropriate frameworks, methodologies, standards, tools and techniques.

• Active management of project plans, risks, issues, dependencies, and assumptions. Identifying threats and opportunities that arise, understanding their impact on key objectives - taking the appropriate approach to their management. 

• Supporting decision-making by identifying, interpreting, analysing, and presenting information. Specifically providing detailed insightful reporting and clear briefings on complex issues to senior stakeholders and chairing boards within a formal governance framework. 

• Management of a complex workload. Using innovative approaches and personal resilience to respond quickly and decisively to changing and challenging priorities and deadlines to deliver valued outcomes. 

• Successfully leading across functional and organizational boundaries. Specifically, evidence of influencing decision-making through strong, collaborative relationships, inspiring and motivating people by providing clear direction amidst uncertainty, role modelling appropriate behaviors, and challenging inappropriate ones. 

Behaviours

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

• Leadership

• Communicating and Influencing

• Making Effective Decisions

• Delivering at Pace

Technical skills

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

• Frameworks & Methodologies (Practitioner Level) -Project Delivery Capability Framework

• Planning (Practitioner Level) -Project Delivery Capability Framework

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £56,861, Office for National Statistics contributes £16,472 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme.

The Office for National Statistics is part of the Civil Service, and as such we share a number of key benefits with other departments, whilst also having our own unique offerings to support our 5400 valued colleagues across the business.

Whether you are hearing about us for the first time or already know a bit about our organisation, we hope that the benefits pack attached (bottom of page) will give you a great insight into the benefits and facilities available to our colleagues, and our fantastic working culture.