Head of Portfolio

Team - Prospect, Direct and Life Adviser

Working Pattern - Hybrid - 2 days per week in any of the Vitality Offices (Bournemouth, Stockport or London). Full time hours.

We are happy to discuss flexible working!

Top 3 skills needed for this role:

• Senior Stakeholder management.
• Portfolio management.
• Comfortable with working in a matrix organisation.
  
  

What this role is all about:

The Head of Portfolio provides governance and oversight to their associated journey. The primary role is to ensure overall control, coordination and oversight of the journey’s risk profile, finances, reporting, resourcing and dependencies as well as acting as SAFe Agile Champion for its journey.

The Head of Portfolio works closely with the Head(s) of Product and Engineering to ensure robust and forward-looking roadmaps are maintained.

This senior leadership role is crucial in driving the journey agenda, ensuring complete alignment with the Vitality’s strategic goals, and enhancing the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the Journey. The role holder is adaptable enough to respond to the needs of the journey and focus in on key responsibilities where required.

Key Actions

Strategic Leadership

• Support the Journey Director in the development and implementation of the Journeys strategic vision in alignment with the company’s long-term objectives.
• Drive the transformation agenda, ensuring the prioritisation, scope and approach to change initiatives support the overall journey strategy and deliver significant value.
• Manages the journeys’ Business Acceptance Testing resource, working with the business to prioritise resource allocation based on risk, complexity and availability.
  
  

Delivery

• Ensure a balanced portfolio that optimally allocates resources and mitigates risks while maximises value.
• Provides delivery assurance to the journeys strategic initiatives including top level risk and dependency management.
• Where additional delivery assurance is required, define demand for Project Services resource based on breadth and complexity. Work with Project Management Practice Lead to secure resource and ensure appropriate onboarding.
• Supports the journey by contributing to the definition and implementation of the operating model, ways of working and effectiveness of the journey.
  
  

Budget & Value

• Ensuring the Journey’s roadmaps are resource balanced and funded. This includes full oversight of the Journey’s budget and adherence to the Journeys Capex targets.
• Track spend against budget to ensure optimal delivery of initiatives in line with cost control; particularly external spend but also providing support to Journey Director and IT Directors to manage the overall Journey finances.
• Support “Lean Business Case” development ensuring initiatives represent and deliver value aligned to the Journeys OKRs.
• Provide timely OKR MI into Group and ExCo reporting, including coordinating the population and completion of key EXCO, Board, risk and other governance presentations.
  
  

Risk and Dependencies

• Collaborate with other Head of Portfolio’s to prioritise across portfolios for alignment and dependency control via the Portoflio Syncs.
• Embrace being a Risk Champion for the Journey. Ensure risk management is being adopted throughout the journey and adhering to the Enterprise Risk Management Framework.
• Report conflicts, constraints, dependencies through Journey Leadership team and Enterprise Exco.
  
  

Stakeholder Management

• Act as a primary point of contact for senior stakeholders, including Enterprise ExCo, to communicate progress, mitigate risk, resolve issues, and align on strategic priorities.
  
  

SAFe

• Plays a pivotal role as SAFe Agile coach championing and embedding SAFe agile practices and closely collaborates with the Lean Agile Centre of Excellence.
  
  

What do you need to thrive?

• SAFe Agile - Leading SAFe & Lean Portfolio Management.
• Prince 2 or APM Certification.
• Bachelor’s degree required; or more than five years of related experience in operations, IT or product development.
• Practical experience of different project and agile methodologies.
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and manage multiple priorities effectively.
• Proven ability to build and lead integrated teams from various internal and external organisations across multiple locations.
• Experience in coaching team members, harnessing and developing strengths in pursuit of successful outcomes.
• Proven problem-solving, decision-making, and financial skills.
• Appropriate knowledge of the regulatory and quality requirements for the financial services industry.
• Effective business-development skills, including proposal development and preparation.
  
  

So, what’s in it for you?

• Bonus Schemes - A bonus that regularly rewards you for your performance
• A pension of up to 12%- We will match your contributions up to 6% of your salary
• Our award-winning Vitality health insurance - With its own set of rewards and benefits
• Life Assurance - Four times annual salary
  
  

These are just some of the many perks that we offer! To view the extensive range of benefits we offer, please visit our careers page. Fantastic Benefits. Exciting rewards. Great career opportunities!

If you are successful in your application and join us at Vitality, this is our promise to you, we will:

• Help you to be the healthiest you’ve ever been.
• Create an environment that embraces you as you are and enables you to be your best self.
• Give you flexibility on how, where and when you work.
• Help you advance your career by playing you to your strengths.
• Give you a voice to help our business grow and make Vitality a great place to be.
• Give you the space to try, fail and learn.
• Provide a healthy balance of challenge and support.
• Recognise and reward you with a competitive salary and amazing benefits.
• Be there for you when you need us.
• Provide opportunities for you to be a force for good in society.
  
  

We commit to all these things because we want you to feel that you belong, and are supported to be happy and healthy.