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:

Reporting to the Director of Transformation Programme, this role exists to lead the Programme Test Partner to complete all testing phases across the Programme including the planning phase, test scenario reviews and traceability with high quality output to ensure the Programme delivers to time ensuring all Business and IT Test criteria has been met. The role is critical to building and leading the testing team for the success of a >400M programme. The role is responsible for defining the scope of testing within the context of each release/delivery and will deploy and manage the resources needed for testing.  The role will apply the appropriate test measurements and metrics in the product and testing team to ensure the quality of the new solution. 

This is a high-profile leadership position, reporting directly to senior leadership team member, working with senior stakeholders right across the business, and the successful candidate will be expected to be comfortable in communicating at this level to ensure the Transformation agenda is a top priority across the wider organisation.

Key Accountabilities:

• Lead the test Partners (>150 resources on and off shore) to complete all phases of Testing (SIT, E2E, FIT, UAT, OAT, Performance, Migration and Environment) successfully and to time
• Provide programme test governance to the test partners across parallel releases, multiple test phases and workstreams
• Interprets complex data and makes appropriate recommendations
• Manages assigned project test budgets. Tracks budget variances and agrees these with Projects. Revises estimates, required resource profiles and costs for project CRs, and manages Programme acceptance of estimate costs
• Sign off project key deliverables such as Test Strategy, Approach and Closure Report. Work with the Partners and Business to ensure Scope and Coverage is aligned with Requirements & Designs
• Manages Risks, issues and escalations
• Build Partnerships with key suppliers and Managed Service partners to ensure that the programme acts as one team and delivers the overall outcomes
• Work closely with Head of end to end Technical Design, Head of Programme Delivery & Head of Technical Delivery to ensure the plan is completed on time and budget
• Evaluates risks on the basis of test results and clearly communicates any commercial implications to Executive Leadership 

The Must Haves:

• Significant Test Programme Delivery experience of large scale BSS Technology Transformation programmes that are Business Led with the ability to operate with gravitas to Executive level
• Significant transformation leadership experience demonstrating the ability to lead and inspire large teams to achieve exceptional results within matrix managed organisation
• Is an excellent communicator (and listener) at all levels - able to translate complexity into straightforward and simple language
• Able to influence others in the absence of direct authority
• Ability to build strong cross team relationships in a challenging environment
• Dynamic and customer-centric with the ability to flourish in a high-growth, fast-paced environment
• Ability to be strategic whilst delivering against challenging timescales and budget
• Has vision, drive, diplomacy and the ability to make things happen in an environment of ambiguity, complexity and multiple stakeholders
• Able to both lead strategic thinking and drive on-time and budget delivery of large-scale complex programmes
• Understanding of ‘out of the box’ BSS product solutions and how to ensure these deliver the business and customer needs 

The Desirables:

• Telecoms Test knowledge in fixed and mobile
• Previous experience in IT Transformation leading the test team
• Previous experience in >£30m budget management 

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.