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Portfolio Lead | Inside IR35 | up to £700 per day | 1 day in London per week

Solirius Limited
2 hours ago
Contract
London
United Kingdom
£700 - £700 GBP daily

Portfolio Lead | Inside IR35 | up to £700 per day | 1 day in London per week

The Role

We are seeking an experienced Portfolio Lead to join our newly established Prisons Data Division within the Ministry of Justice Data Directorate. Following a wider restructure, this division has been formed to bring together Data Engineering, Analytical Engineering, and Data Science & AI capabilities into a cohesive, end-to-end data function.

In this vital role, you will hold ultimate delivery oversight, maintaining a single, trusted view of all delivery progress, risks, and dependencies across the division's multidisciplinary "Rainbow Teams". You will be responsible for defining the division's overarching vision and strategic direction, managing overall capacity, and leading high-level prioritisation. This is an essential change management role. Beyond establishing standard ways of working and robust reporting pipelines, you will lead the transition planning to safely pass operations over to permanent-staff ownership by the end of the engagement.

Skills and Experience Required

  • Change Management & Division Setup: Proven experience leading large-scale change initiatives and organisational restructures. You excel at establishing new team structures, defining clear role accountabilities, and designing sustainable support models.

  • Vision & Strategic Planning: Strong track record of defining, setting, and executing a clear vision and long-term delivery strategy for data or technical divisions.

  • Portfolio Management & Governance: Experience embedding best practices in Portfolio Management. You are highly skilled in maintaining forward-looking views of delivery confidence, systemic risks, and cross-cutting dependencies across multiple concurrent workstreams.

  • Division-Level Reporting: Ability to design and establish highly structured, consistent reporting processes from the ground up. This includes aligning updates to complex, senior governance structures such as the Service Transformation Group (STG), Quarterly Business Reviews (QBR), and Data Delivery Boards.

  • Establishing Ways of Working: Expert at designing and implementing agile ways of working, operational boundaries, and collaborative cadences across diverse functional teams (eg, policy, digital, strategy, and engineering).

  • Capacity & Demand Management: Strong capacity to manage division-wide throughput, proactively balancing incoming demand against resourcing constraints and recommending clear trade-off choices to senior leadership.

Technical Experience and Tooling

  • Data & Analytics Program Delivery: Solid background supporting or overseeing delivery in complex data environments, particularly pipelines, platform migrations, or data-sharing initiatives (experience with HMPPS data or AWS analytical platforms is a strong advantage).

  • Portfolio Management Software: Proficiency in utilising modern agile tracking, roadmap modelling, and portfolio visualisation tools to maintain "decision-ready" reporting.

Specific Deliverables/Artifacts

  • Portfolio Reporting Framework: Standardised reporting templates and operational cadences successfully adopted across the entire Prisons Data Division.

  • Division Ways of Working: Formally documented team interfaces, intake/triage processes, and operational boundaries for Strategy, Transformation, and Engineering teams.

  • Strategic Delivery Roadmap: An active, prioritised, and capacity-mapped forward plan of work items aligned with key stakeholders.

  • Division Transition & Exit Plan: A comprehensive transition model outlining target permanent structures, required roles, skills-gap analyses, and documented asset ownership to ensure a seamless supplier exit.

Working Arrangements

One day per week in the London office, with the remainder completed remotely.