Strategy & Planning Lead - FS Experience

Job Title: Strategy & Planning Lead - FS Experience
Location: Sheffield
Salary/Rate: Up to £495 per day INSIDE IR35
Start Date: 27/05/2025
Job Type: Contract

Company Introduction
We have an exciting opportunity now available with one of our sector-leading financial services clients! They are currently looking for a skilled Strategy & Planning Lead to join their team for an initial contract until the end of November.

Job Responsibilities/Objectives

• Responsible for the overall delivery of strategic portfolio outcomes supporting business vision and purpose through complex and global change portfolios.
• Owns CTO portfolio strategy and ensures organisational strategic requirements and priorities are understood, documented and are supported by technology architecture roadmaps and vendor strategy.
• Ownership and delivery of strategic planning cycles across change portfolios to ensure financial investment decisions supports CTO long term strategy, risk appetite and aligns to strategy and future business/customer needs.
• Development of business cases and benefit validation to support transformation, strategic initiatives and to support fast paced business responses to emerging threats and opportunities
• Develop and drive regular engagement with senior stakeholders at C-suite and director level, to influence and deliver CTO vision and strategy
• Support the management of risks across CTO by ensuring portfolio risks, issues and dependencies are managed effectively and senior stakeholders are informed/updated where appropriate
• Own and deliver portfolio level reporting associated with strategy and planning
• The role includes supporting leadership development within the CTO Change portfolio management team
• Supporting management of portfolio budgets to help CTO meet its annual operating plan of approx. $2bn P&L across 65 countries, including identification and delivery of savings opportunities across portfolios as required.
• Ensuring that CTO is able to meet committed outcomes by working with engineering teams to align supply to meet forecasted demand pipelines
• Ensure CTO programmes are well interlocked with other programmes within Technology and dependencies are well understood and managed

Required Skills/Experience
The ideal candidate will have the following:

• Strategic portfolio management or relevant experience, ideally within Financial Services technology functions and working with C-level executives
• Strong emotional intelligence and leadership: Navigate organisational complexities, foster a positive work culture, and lead teams effectively.
• Proven experience of large-scale transformation
• Knowledge of portfolio management principles and practices
• Excellent communication/presentation skills required
• Proven ability to articulate complex issues concisely, suitable for all levels across the group
• Pro-active problem solving skills, able to work to under pressure to challenging timescales and deliver at pace
• Strong stakeholder management capability and excellent communication at all levels of seniority
• Detailed understanding of the financial & strategy planning
• Experience working with annual operations plans and multi-million dollar global programs and initiatives
• Excellent commercial awareness and proven ability to develop multi-year business cases worth over $100m
• Sound knowledge and understanding of the infrastructure technology landscape and industry
• Experience of working in a diverse global team
• Flexible and adaptable to changing activities, schedules, workloads and priorities that are potentially highly restricted in nature, unpredictable, wide ranging, complex and time sensitive requires the simultaneous handling of a broad range of issues
• Proven leadership & strong teamwork skills, seeking to influence within and outside of the team and successfully encourage teams to work together
• Experience of continuous improvement

If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply now with your updated CV in Microsoft Word/PDF format.

Disclaimer
Notwithstanding any guidelines given to level of experience sought, we will consider candidates from outside this range if they can demonstrate the necessary competencies.

Square One is acting as both an employment agency and an employment business, and is an equal opportunities recruitment business. Square One embraces diversity and will treat everyone equally. Please see our website for our full diversity statement.