Virgin Media O2 brings two of the UK’s most iconic brands together. With over 47 million connections across broadband, mobile, TV and home phone, we’re a fully integrated communications, entertainment and business solutions provider. It’s no mean feat and we’ll need resilience, patience, and boundless energy to achieve our ambitious plans. As a customer first organisation, we’re seeking amazing talent to join us, as we reimagine connectivity, and upgrade the UK, for the benefit of our customers, businesses, and communities. We have a strong commitment to playing our part in driving positive change and sustainability, including a market-leading pledge to be net carbon neutral by 2025.

Location: Slough or Leeds  

Virgin Media O2 is running a multi-year, transformation programme to transform and rationalise our consumer and SMBB estate. 

The programme goal is to enable a step change in capability to meet the VMO2 strategic objectives to:

• Transform the customer experience
• Deliver a step change in our ability to innovate
• Simplify our business and business processes

We have built a brand new single integrated customer platform which replaces multiple existing systems, enhancing the way we do business and sell. The new solution will enable us to make changes more quickly and predict customer behaviour to proactively help them and improve customer service.  This programme aligns with the company’s purpose of re-imagining connectivity by upgrading our infrastructure to make it easier for our customers to do business with us.

Role Purpose 

The Senior Manager Transformation Programme Governance and Planning is a critical role within the IT transformation programme team, responsible for the governance, strategy and planning of a large consumer transformation programme.  The role has oversight of the delivery of all projects and programmes with the IT transformation portfolio, ensuring this is aligned to the overall IT strategy and governance and aligning to budget forecasts.  Dependency management will be a crucial part of this role, ensuring that intracompany dependencies are identified and tracked to ensure safeguard to programme delivery.

The Senior Manager will need to collaborate closely with other central governance functions, especially Office of the CIO, and equivalent functions in CTO and CDO.

Providing clear leadership and management to the teams, ensuring people, knowledge and skillsets are in place and creating a collaborative culture that demonstrates a drive for continuous improvement.

The role demands an individual who can create process improvement initiatives and be adept at inspiring teams to apply the initiatives and realise the benefits of process optimisation. They should be capable of building consensus among a diverse group of matrix stakeholders and facilitate resolutions to the challenges that arise from business processes that span many areas of VMO2.

A curious and analytical individual who can combine both the, ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ worlds.

The successful individual will have presence, analytical rigour, the ability to frame complex problems in a way that simplifies them and will have strong influencing skills coupled with gravitas / credibility. The incumbent will be required to influence at senior levels, including c-suite, and be able to challenge senior stakeholders effectively.

The role requires influencing at senior levels (including c-suite) and will require someone who is able to use data and critical thinking to make rational decisions, whilst under pressure to deliver.  They will be able to balance strategic and tactical decisions to achieve programme outcomes.

The role will require working with all teams across IT – especially the Architecture team, the Delivery team and the Build, Test and Run team. 

The role will lead on the development and tracking of the 5-year IT Strategy plan.  This is where the pre-requisites of being able to work in a senior, matrix team, influencing and building long term IT strategies will come in handy.

The role ensures that the Programme is fully compliant with reporting, finances and planning throughout the CIO organisation.  

Reporting into the Director of the transformation programme and acting as a Trusted Advisor the role provides business support capabilities to the wider CIO leadership team focussing on programme deliverables, ensuring that risks are understood and managed, and that we meet our performance goals and objectives through our people and our partners.

The Senior Manager Transformation Programme Governance and Planning ensures that the programme is well run, risks are well managed and provides insights and information to the wider organisation regarding the programme.   The role will be managing (directly / indirectly) a team of internal and external PMO resource, as well as have influence over people supporting the following areas of the programme:

• Risk and Compliance
• Resource and budget spend management
• Strategic planning, ensuring we have an underpinned plan that meets our wider business goals
• Programme Employee engagement and comms
• Work closely with our vendor management teams to ensure that the programme is delivering against our obligations

Key Accountabilities and Deliverables:

• Lead Central PMO Engagement on behalf of the programme
• Ensure cohesive view of Front Door/New Demand engagement into the programme
• Accountable for cross team alignment support and communications
• Commercial Management working closely with finance
• Aggregating Reports and Exec review packs
• Management of tools
• Strategic 3-year planning
• Risk & Compliance including supporting internal and external audits
• Resource and aggregated budget spend management 

The must haves: 

• Excellent interpersonal and influencing skills to gain stakeholder engagement
• Ability to improve operational efficiency, service delivery and information management across the IT organization
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Broad knowledge of the IT industry and the products and services provided by technology vendors
• Ability to think strategically
• Excellent commercial acumen and understanding of our business and financial KPI’s
• Strong leadership capability, executing as appropriate in the areas of responsibility
• Expertise in budget planning, financial management and workforce management
• Ability to improve operational efficiency, service delivery and information management across the IT organisation
• Leading and motivating teams, including talent development, succession planning

The Desirables:

• Telecoms knowledge
• Previous experience in a large transformation programme
• Experience with board level/SLT engagement

We’ll be sending you emails about the status of your application. To make sure you receive these, please add @O2.com and @telefonica.com to your Safe Senders list.

We’re looking to pay a great compensation package (depending on experience) for this position. We also offer plenty of extras to sweeten the deal, which could include things like bonuses, life assurance cover, health care and lots of flexible benefits.  

Also, every employee has their personal development supported with a LinkedIn learning account; plus other role specific learning available through our award-winning digital learning platform - O2 Campus. 

We also believe a great work-life balance is important, so we’re open to considering flexible working arrangements. Like to know more, feel free to raise it.  

Join us and we’ll encourage you to be bold every day. So take a deep breath, your career is about to go to exciting new places. 

If you have any questions around the role then please email ResourceTUK@o2.com who will be happy to help.