Head of Project Management Office

Posting date:	17 July 2025
Hours:	Full time
Closing date:	16 August 2025
Location:	Liverpool, L3 1DG
Company:	System C
Job type:	Permanent
Job reference:	REQ822

Summary

Description

The Head of PMO will be responsible for the Professional Services Portfolio Management Office. The post holder will demonstrate practical experience of a leadership role and/or managing/matrix managing teams and be a key analytical leader in the business.

The successful candidate will have strong data scientist skills and be highly analytical - able to interrogate large datasets to extract performance insights and inform the future trajectory of our portfolio. They will be proficient in Excel (including pivot tables), experienced in writing Power BI reports, and ideally familiar with Precursive.

This role will require working closely with key stakeholders across the organisation, often at Director level, to provide actionable insights, performance reports and predictive analytics that support strategic delivery objectives and continuous improvement.

They will be an excellent communicator, confident in engaging senior leadership, and capable of translating complex data into meaningful business information. The ideal candidate will be pragmatic, delivery-focused and a strong advocate for best practice.

Duties and Responsibilities:

• Management of the Portfolio Management Office (PMO).
• Line management of the PMO Team, x3 Project Support Officers (PSO).
• Work with Portfolio Project Managers (approx. 30) and provide governance oversight of delivery of their projects. This will be a transition in H1 2025.
• Creation and management of best practice PMO processes and controls.
• Supporting, developing, and training of the PSOs in relation to processes and tools.
• Creation of high-quality data analytic reports and dashboards to support board and executive-level reporting.
• Development of regular utilisation and project performance reports to ensure delivery success and resource efficiency.
• Preparing board level reporting and taking executive-level detailed minutes, actions, and decisions.
• Implementation and continuous improvement of project management processes and controls.
• Ensuring data quality standards across the Project Management team are adhered to.
• Effective stakeholder expectation management and communication.
• Financial responsibility: Collating and reviewing Portfolio Finances, challenging variances against forecasts with Programme Leads, and reporting discrepancies to the Director.
• Portfolio risk and issue management.
• Portfolio-level dependency tracking and management.
• Resource planning and constraint identification across the Portfolio.
• Portfolio planning - inflight and backlog project tracking and milestone assurance.
• Opportunity identification and prioritisation scoring in collaboration with Programme Leads.
• Project closure process and documentation compliance.
• Change request trend analysis and early warning insights.
• Lessons learned reviews to identify and act on themes and trends.
• Benefits identification and realisation tracking across programmes/projects.

Requirements:

• Experience working as a PMO Manager or similar leadership role within a mid/large corporate PMO function. Minimum 5 years' PMO experience.
• Experience in resource management, RAID management, change control and benefits realisation.
• Financial planning and performance analysis.
• Proactive and flexible, capable of both team collaboration and independent work.

Essential:

• Project Management qualification - Prince2
• Power BI proficiency
• Advanced Excel (incl. pivot tables)

Desirable:

• Agile project qualifications (e.g. APM Agile Foundation / SAFe)
• Power BI dashboarding and reporting at executive level
• Experience with Precursive

Skills Required:

• Track record of managing programmes/projects with multiple teams within a formal methodology.
• Project Management qualification such as Prince2.
• Demonstrable experience of Agile methodology and techniques.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills.
• Experience of commercial frameworks and working with 3rd parties.
• High-level analytical and reporting skills, with strong planning and organisational capability.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills, including at senior/executive level.
• Experience of working with geographically distributed teams.
• A good understanding of matrix management structures.

Applications:

• MS Office including MS Project
• Jira / Confluence
• PSA system (Open Air, Precursive) i.e., time recording / resource management
• PPM tools (e.g., Monday.com or similar)