Project Management Office Compliance Manager

We are proud to be One Team at East Midlands Railway (EMR). We are passionate about keeping people safe, delighting our customers and doing the right thing. With over 2,600 employees, our people are the reason we are so successful, and our Project Management Office make a crucial contribution to this. Ten times accredited as a Top Employer, we value our people and are dedicated to making sure that everybody feels empowered to bring their authentic self to work.

At EMR we want to proactively embrace diversity across our workforce and recognise that we are under-represented in terms of females and ethnic minority groups. We’re therefore taking positive steps to promote a positive and inclusive culture; we welcome applications from those that identify with these groups to better represent our communities.

We have an exciting opportunity for you to join #TeamEMR as a Project Management Office (PMO) Compliance Manager.

In this role as a PMO Compliance Manager, you will be responsible for ensuring that EMR projects comply with the mandated project lifecycle and Group Operating Standards from project concept through to closure. Reporting to the PMO Manager, you will oversee project compliance strategy, stage gate reviews, risk reporting and mitigation, change control, internal audits, project closure, and benefits management. You will also provide guidance, training, and mentoring to the wider project community to improve overall compliance across the programme.

Key Roles and Responsibilities

• Development and rollout of a Project Compliance Strategy, to define how governance and compliance will be measured across all projects. Deliver training and embedment of the strategy across affected business areas.
• Management of the Stage Gate Review Process, ensuring that all new projects can demonstrate adherence to the stage gate process and have a robust audit trail to demonstrate compliance.
• Development of an internal audit process for live projects, which must be robust and standardised. Ensuring that this is undertaken on a regular basis and findings are shared with project sponsors, thereby driving the quality and compliance of project delivery across the portfolio.
• Create and own a plan to tackle areas of improvement identified through the PMO Internal Audit Process. This should result in a demonstrable increase in compliance for the areas identified annually.
• Responsibility for the Project Change Control Process: supporting Project Managers to identify when a Change Request needs to be produced; ensuring a standardised and auditable process takes place with engagement from key stakeholders; and that outcomes of change requests are acted upon in a timely manner on receipt.
• Development and delivery of a Benefits Management and Realisation Strategy for EMR, ensuring alignment with Exec Team requirements and using strong senior stakeholder relationships to achieve business buy-in. Roll out of strategy in a phased approach, including delivery of training, tools and guides to support delivery.
• Ownership of the Project Closure Process (both initial transition to BAU Phases and Final Post Implementation Reviews), ensuring projects are formally closed down, with engagement from key stakeholders, including the validation of benefits and lessons learned. Collaborate with the Finance Team to ensure this process is fit for purpose.
• Ownership of a lesson learned database, proactively promoting, and building on best practice for use by the project community.
• Accountable for the development of an overall Portfolio ‘key’ risk register and mitigation plans, reporting on a regular basis the risk profile, including risks that have become issues in addition to changes in risk ratings and themes across the whole EMR project portfolio to allow for escalation to sponsors and Exec.
• Identify and escalate portfolio risks at project sponsor level, supporting mitigation plans to improve the quality of project delivery; ultimately driving down the Portfolio risk profile.
• Ownership and responsibility for the annual and ad hoc maintenance of all PMO governance documentation and PM Document Matrix so that it is up to date and compliant.
• Continually review and improve the project compliance processes, ensuring a ‘fit for purpose’ set of processes is available to support the EMR project community and achievement of business requirements.

Key Skills & Experience

• Demonstrated experience in a PMO environment, or equivalent, with a focus on project compliance.
• Knowledge of project compliance, risk, change and closure management.
• Experience in the development and delivery of tools and training to support Project Teams.
• Educated to a degree level, or equivalent experience, with an APM PMQ Qualification. Willingness to work towards further APM Qualifications.
• Experience of thinking and acting strategically to drive continuous improvement.
• Excellent communicator, both in writing and verbally; adept at recognising and appropriately addressing different types of audience
• Strong analytical capability with a high standard of business/commercial acumen. Experience of managing and presenting accurate reports and documentation including strategic direction, themes and complexities as well as appropriate escalation management.
• Proven ability to build and influence tactical relationships and cross functional senior stakeholders up to Executive level.
• Strong problem-solving skills and the ability to make decisions based on the information provided, with the ability to quickly analyse and summarise complex data.
• Must adopt a pro-active approach and can-do attitude.
• Excellent knowledge and understanding of MS Excel, Word and PowerPoint

As well as a competitive salary, we’ll also offer you:

• Excellent Railway Pension scheme
• Free standard travel on East Midlands Railway and Train Operating Companies under Transport UK
• Friends and Family discounted Tickets on the EMR Network
• 32 Days paid leave, increasing to 34 after 2 years’ service
• 75% discount on National Travel (inc partner and dependants)
• Various training opportunities
• …and many more!

EMR has a hybrid working policy which is applicable for this role. This means the role can be based at home 2-3 days per week and in the office 2-3 days per week. Should you wish to work full time in the office this is also an option.

We are open minded to applications from people who wish to have flexible working. Many of our staff work flexibly in many different ways. Please talk to us at interview about the flexibility you need. We can’t promise to give you exactly what you want, but we do promise not to judge you for asking.