Purposeful vision. Agile planning. Steadfast persistence.  

X2 Senior Project Manager

£55,000 - £60,000 per annum + benefits

Reports to: One vacancy will report into the Head of Portfolio Strategy & Planning and the second to the Director of Product & Portfolio Strategy

Directorate: Marketing, Fundraising & Engagement

Contract: 18 month fixed-term contract

Hours: Full time 35 hours per week

Location: Stratford, London. Office-based with high flexibility (1-2 days per week in the office).

Visa sponsorship: You must be eligible to work in the UK to apply for this vacancy. Cancer Research UK is not able to offer visa sponsorship. 

Closing date: 30 August 2024, 23:55

This vacancy may close earlier if a high volume of applications is received or once a suitable candidate is found, therefore we strongly recommend that you apply early to avoid disappointment. If you require more time to apply as part of a reasonable adjustment, please contact [email protected] as soon as possible.

Recruitment process: One competency-based interview (onsite at Stratford)

Interview date: From the week commencing 09 September 2024

How do I apply? We operate an anonymised shortlisting process in our commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion. CVs are required for all applications; but we won’t be able to view them until we invite you for an interview. Instead, we ask you to fully complete the work history section of the online application form for us to be able to assess you quickly, fairly, and objectively.

At Cancer Research UK, we exist to beat cancer.

We are professionals with purpose, beating cancer every day. But we need to go much further and much faster. That’s why we’re looking for someone talented, someone who wants to develop their skills, someone like you.

Cancer Research UK has a vision to bring about a world where everybody can lead longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer. However, to achieve our mission and grow our funding, we must build even greater momentum and urgency around our cause, and engage and inspire millions of people in deeper, more meaningful ways to join our mission. Therefore, we have created a long-term Engage Strategy and designed a bold transformation programme to better harness data and digital marketing technology to deliver more relevant, trusted, and frictionless experiences for our audiences (and in turn drive contribution growth).

As a Senior Project Manager, you will play an essential role in driving Engage transformation initiatives by project managing a workstream across multiple products and teams across our Marketing, Fundraising & Events directorate (including business design, technology and data), while matrix-reporting into the Engage Project Management Office. In this role, no day will be the same; you will manage a complex workload providing capability planning that balances and meets the organisation's needs while coordinating business design activities and engaging and collaborating with a range of stakeholders across the directorate.

If you have a project management background delivering digital transformation initiatives in large, complex organisations across multiple products, we would love for you to join our mission.

What will I be doing?

• Project managing business design and delivery of new processes, covering people, technology, data and associated business change across Marketing, Fundraising & Events. 

  • This will involve using an end-to-end approach that is aligned to programme methodology and parallel workstreams.  

• Coordinating business design activities, often working with external parties to incorporate specialist expertise. 

• Identifying stakeholders and ensuring effective stakeholder engagement and collaboration throughout the project.  

• Developing project plans with clear deliverables, milestones, dependencies, owners, risks, issues, and mitigations while coordinating the relevant stakeholders to ensure actions are prioritised and progressed at pace.  

• Managing escalations appropriately ensuring to consider the risks, costs, benefits, and options to ensure decisions are made by the appropriate representatives based on evidence.  

• Identifying and planning resource needs, governance, and structure to support delivery.

• Adapting as the project moves from design to delivery, and into post-go live activity.  

• Providing regular reporting on delivery, benefits, and resources into the Engage transformation programme and Senior Leadership Team.  

• Collaborating with Business Change Managers to link in with internal communications partners ensuring programme updates are incorporated into the internal communications plan.  

• Applying an agile mindset to effectively deliver a range of complex projects. 

• Providing administrative support as needed (including scheduling necessary meetings and workshops).  

• Supporting other initiatives across the Engage transformation programme, as required. 

What are you looking for?

• Project Management background (ideally has a project management qualification such as APM, Prince 2, Agile etc but we are open to candidates who are qualified by experience).

• Successfully delivered digital transformation programmes and projects in large, complex, multi-product organisations (ideally in a Marketing/ Fundraising environment but we welcome applications from alternative industries).

• Can manage, drive and lead different cross-functional change projects simultaneously.

• Set up ways of working with strong process and product design and implementation skills.

• Excellent planning and organisational skills with the ability to prioritise, manage, and delegate multiple tasks and meet deadlines (including the workload of others).

• Built collaborative stakeholder relationships across all levels (including Senior Leadership) with the ability to challenge and influence across complex matrix-management structures.

• Proactive, resilient, and solutions-driven approach to unblocking challenges.

Our organisation values are designed to guide all that we do.

Bold: Act with ambition, courage and determination  

Credible: Act with rigour and professionalism   

Human: Act to have a positive impact on people  

Together: Act inclusively and collaboratively

We’re looking for people who can believe in and embody these organisation values and can use them to drive forward progress against our mission to beat cancer.

If you’re interested in applying and excited about working with us but are unsure if you have the right skills and experience we’d still love to hear from you.

What will I gain?

We create a working environment that supports your wellbeing and provide a generous benefits package, a wide range of career and personal development opportunities and high-quality tools. Our policies and processes enable you to improve your work-life balance, take positive steps in your career and achieve your personal wellbeing goals.

You can explore our benefits by visiting our careers web page.

Additional information

If you want to know more about this role, here is a full job description. Please note this is a generalist profile used for internal & external purposes meaning we don’t expect candidates to meet all the criteria included (we will be shortlisting based on the essential criteria advertised).

For more information about working with us please visit our website or contact us at [email protected].  

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