Defence Business Services (DBS) – AFVS Assistant Head Optimisation

Key Responsibilities

Innovation and Disruption

• Nurture a culture of innovation by encouraging teams to challenge the status quo, propose new ideas, and explore disruptive technologies and processes
• Identify opportunities for digital transformation and implement solutions that promote agility and resilience within AFVS operations

Leadership and Collaboration

• Provide leadership, direction and management of the Optimisation team
• Build, lead and maintain multi-disciplinary teams to ensure they are motivated, collaborating, and working well
• Focus the team on to the delivery of products and services
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation
• Collaborate across AFVS to ensure alignment of strategies with organisational goals
• Manage relationships with vendors, stakeholders, internal suppliers and contractors
• Use retrospectives and health checks to identify and rectify issues in the team dynamic

Agile and Lean practices

• Coach and lead teams in Agile and Lean good practices
• Create and tailor the right approach for a team, challenging, evaluating and iterating the approach through the life cycle
• Experiment with new and innovative ways of working to improve delivery across the organisation

Stakeholder Engagement

• Cultivate and nurture robust relationships with key stakeholders to ensure the sub-portfolio aligns with organisational requirements
• Lead workshops, forums, and reviews to develop a climate of openness and cooperation

Communicating between the technical and non-technical

• Mediate between people and strengthen relationships, adopting the appropriate communication method with stakeholders at all levels
• Manage stakeholder expectations and moderate difficult discussions about complex topics

Capability Development

• Remove blockers and manage risks, commercials, budgets, and people
• Manage dependencies of varying complexity, potentially planning, and feeding into larger programmes and portfolios
• Navigate through technical strategy, business architecture, and agile delivery in a complex and fast-paced environment
• Support benefits management and realisation

Maintaining delivery momentum

• Optimise the delivery flow of teams
• Actively address the most complicated risks, issues and dependencies
• Identify innovative ways to unblock issues

Making a process work

• Identify and challenge organisational processes of increasing complexity and those processes that are unnecessarily complicated
• Add value and can coach the organisation to inspect and adapt processes
• Guide teams through the implementation of a new process

Qualification & Requirements

Ability

• You are intellectually agile, proactive, self-motivated and a personable team player.

Required Experience

Essential:

• Excellent leadership and team management skills.
• Effective communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Proven experience in delivery management roles, particularly in digital and agile environments.
• Strong understanding of agile methodologies and project management principles.
• Proven ability to mentor and coach team members
• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities with a proven ability to recommend and implement novel solutions

Desirable:

• Experience in strategic planning and analysis
• Broad experience of applying business experimentation to promote rapid learning and option creation.
• Experience in managing complex, high-risk projects
• Broad practical experience of change and project delivery using traditional waterfall and agile approaches
• Familiarity with ITIL
• Experience with optimisation, agile planning and innovation visualisation tools.

Desirable Qualifications:

• Certification in Agile Foundation
  • E.g. Agile Project Management, Registered Scrum Team Member (RSTM), Agile Training Theory, Agile Awareness Workshop, SAFe for Teams or Leading SAFe.
• Certified Agile Practitioner, Scrum Master, Product Manager or similar
• Certified ITIL Practitioner or higher
• Commercial contract management.
• Project Management Qualification (e.g Prince 2, APMP)
• Project Management Professional (PMP) or Project Leadership Programme
• Leading and Managing Project Workstreams
• Management of Risk Practitioner
• Agile delivery certification (e.g. PRINCE2 Agile, Kanban, or equivalent)
• Defence Innovation qualification

Benefits

• An environment with flexible working options Monday-Friday
• 25 days paid annual leave rising (1 day per year) to 30 days upon completion of 5 years’ service (pro rata). In addition to 8 public holidays per year, you will also receive leave for the King’s birthday
• Hybrid working, where role permits
• An opportunity to be considered for Reward & Recognition.
• Family friendly policies including parental leave and adoption leave
• Learning and development tailored to your role
• Professional and personal development of skills
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
• Minimum of 15 days special leave in a rolling 12 month period for volunteer reserve commitments
• Special paid leave to volunteer up to 6 days per year
• A Civil Service pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%