Grade: Band D

Salary: £27,795 to £38,925

Closing Date: 31st January 2019

About the role:

This role will work to the strategic direction of WMP and provide advice for the decision making about programmes and projects within the WMP2020 Portfolio. This will include: funding, organisational capacity, interdependencies, resourcing, risk and issue management and cost and quality to deliver the best possible outcomes.

The PPA will lead on defined areas of the portfolio, and work collaboratively across the organisation to plan and pro-actively support portfolio activity, maintaining a strong focus on business outcomes and benefits and will communicate a clear direction to senior managers, colleagues and partners.

Main Duties:

• Quality assure and provide advice on best practice standards and procedures, including templates and guidance across the range of WMP programmes and projects
• Develop and maintain the resource tracker for the portfolio to include project management, enabling functions and project SMEs
• Analyse and interpret the status and performance of the portfolio to agreed timescales.   Providing recommendations on trends, major risks and critical issues to appropriate senior stakeholders in order to support management decisions
• Build and maintain excellent relationships with key stakeholders
• Ensure portfolio stakeholder engagement and communications are timely and effective
• Establish and maintain an information management system and develop a repository of portfolio documentation
• Develop and pro-actively manage the portfolio; risk/issue/dependencies/assumptions/change/lessons learned registers
• Liaise with Finance regarding monitoring of financial spend, investment appraisal and benefits realisation
• Liaise and work with colleagues to deliver portfolio objectives
• Develop accurate and timely solutions, documents and materials for programme and project purposes
• Proactively support the development of Mandates, Outline Business Cases and Detailed Business Cases for all component projects, to the required standard
• Manage the commissioning pipeline to ensure appropriate stakeholder engagement, prioritisation and delivery through the appropriate governance channels 

Hours of Work and Flexibility:

• The post holder will be contracted to work 36.5 hours per week but will need to be flexible to meet the demands of the post and may have to work outside normal core hours. 
• The post holder will need to have the ability to travel to different locations across the region, as required

West Midlands Police are currently undertaking a long term review of staff pay and conditions.  The grade, pay and other terms of employment are therefore subject to review and may change in the future. 

Knowledge & Experience 

Essential:

• A minimum of 3 years’ experience of working in either Project Management Offices, Project Management, Programme Management or equivalent experience
• Experience of working with senior managers
• Experience of working with a wide variety of stakeholder groups (internal and external) 
• Experience of working on own initiative and without supervision
• Demonstrable experience of prioritising work in order to ensure all deadlines are met
• Experience of implementing project and management principles
• Experience of working to a high degree of accuracy with attention to detail
• Experience of analysing, developing, maintaining and extracting data from management information systems and documentation 
• Experience of researching, collating, organising and shaping complex information/data for inclusion in reports/cases
• Experience of identifying realisable benefits as part of a business case

Desirable:

• Business Transformation experience
• Previous experience of working with financial data

Skills 

Essential:

• Proven ability to understand the strategic aims and objectives of the organisation
• Proven communications skills with the ability to operate effectively at a variety of levels 
• Proven influencing and negotiating skills
• Evidence of effective decisions based on business and strategic needs
• Tact and diplomacy skills when dealing with staff at all levels
• Experienced and competent in the use of MS Office applications (specifically Word, Excel, PowerPoint and MS Project)
• Excellent organisational and presentation skills
• Effective team working skills

Desirable:

• Experienced and competent in the use of SharePoint

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