Programme Planning & PMO Lead

Programme Planning & PMO Lead

London (Hybrid 2 days onsite, 3 days at home)

6 -month contract

400 - 480 per day via Umbrella

Planning & Scheduling (40%)

• Develop and maintain the integrated programme plan across all workstreams (business change, technology, Agile delivery), consolidating data from MS Planner, MS Project, JIRA, and supplier plans.
• Re-baseline and optimise plans in response to scope changes, risks, or delivery shifts, ensuring alignment with programme objectives.
• Integrate Agile delivery cycles with stage-gated governance, providing a single source of truth for dependencies, milestones, and critical paths.
• Manage and track cross-workstream dependencies and milestones to inform risk mitigation and decision-making.
• Lead impact assessments for change requests, reflecting effects on timelines, resources, and delivery sequencing.
• Define and enforce planning standards, templates, and tool governance to ensure quality and consistency.

PMO & Governance (40%)

• Set up and maintain SharePoint sites, document libraries, and collaboration spaces to support programme delivery.
• Establish and enforce governance documentation control, ensuring versioning, accessibility, and audit readiness.
• Support change control administration, ensuring requests are logged, assessed, and approved in line with governance.
• Provide quality assurance of deliverables, validating completeness, accuracy, and adherence to standards.
• Facilitate continuous improvement, reviewing PMO processes and implementing efficiencies where needed.

Stakeholder Engagement & Reporting (20%)

• Coordinate with Programme Manager, Workstream Leads, and suppliers to ensure plans and reports are accurate and up to date.
• Schedule and facilitate governance meetings, capture decisions and actions, and monitor follow-up progress.
• Maintain risk, issue, and dependency logs, escalating items as required for timely resolution.
• Produce status reports, dashboards, and executive summaries for senior stakeholders and governance boards.
• Support resource and budget tracking against programme forecasts, flagging variances early.

Qualifications, experience

• Proven experience in programme planning and PMO leadership on complex, multi-workstream programmes.
• Strong knowledge of planning tools (MS Planner, MS Project, JIRA) and integration of multiple data sources.
• Understanding of Agile and stage-gated methodologies and experience aligning them within a single delivery
• Excellent skills in risk, issue, and dependency management and stakeholder engagement.
• High attention to detail, with the ability to produce accurate, insightful reports and dashboards for executive audiences.
• Ability to design and optimise governance processes, improving efficiency while maintaining control.