Job description
At
McLaren, our mission is to set the standard for high performance in sport.
Everyone, in every part of the team, has a role to play. So if you want to test
your ideas with the world watching... And measure your progress in
milliseconds... And play your part in racing history... You belong here. High
performance starts with you.
Purpose of the Role:
The primary purpose of this role is to lead the central Programme Management Office (PMO) within McLaren Racing, establish clear methodologies and governance, and embed the team as a key support function of all areas of the business, ensuring we invest in the best set of programmes and projects and deliver them on time, to quality and within budget to achieve maximum return on investment.
The PMO ensures that the vision and strategy produced by the Exec is converted into the programmes and projects to enable delivery whilst highlighting strategic risks and opportunities to facilitate effective decision making. Portfolio management, project selection and prioritisation, managing the interdependencies between and among projects and serving as a central team for data and information relating to high-value and high-priority projects to facilitate the measurement of the performance of projects and the organisation. Project management and governance, providing knowledge, expertise, and support to individual projects at a tactical level to ensure successful delivery as intended.
The Head of PMO will play a vital and visible role in leading this function, supporting business and racing activities building and developing relationships, offering strategic insights, delivering succinct status reports, and communicating progress to key stakeholders. The candidate will bring with them extensive experience of successfully delivering significant programmes and complex projects, multiple years of leading, management, coaching and development of a high performing and motivated team, implementation of best practices and setting out of robust and flexible governance frameworks across a variety of cross functional projects.
Role Dimensions:
This role sits within the McLaren Racing Business Performance Finance function reporting to the Director of Procurement. The role will have a team who they will provide strategic direction and leadership for, and foster a collaborative, agile and high-performing environment. They will be a proven strategic, positive, and collaborative leader, confident at building strong relationships, with close interaction with the Exec team, functional directors, finance & people partnering teams to ensure that projects and initiatives are resourced appropriately to enable success.
This role will ensure that programmes of work that are critical to the success of the overall McLaren Racing strategy get the status, visibility, and discipline in execution they require. The Head of PMO will develop the framework against which to check that new initiatives meet the strategic criteria, thus ensuring maximum impact and continue to develop the links between the vision, strategic plan through to execution and enable the Exec team to see the progress against key objectives, providing clear standards for optimisation and consistency around programme initiation, planning, delivery, monitoring, and control.
Principal Accountabilities:
- Lead and grow the PMO with appropriate structure, budget management and resource to successfully support the business.
- Develop the pipeline of future Project Management professionals for McLaren Racing,
- Be the face and champion of the PMO; build and maintain excellent relationships across McLaren Racing to empower the team to support and enable clear decision making and leads and deliver successfully on programmes and projects. Educate the wider organisation on the benefits of the PMO and the value the team can add.
- Support the McLaren Racing Exec team with the strategic vision for McLaren, acting as curator for their individual plans and tracking, updating, and reporting as required.
- Fully embed project standardisation & structured documentation, including scoping documents, business cases, timelines, and risk logs to provide consistency and clarity throughout the business.
- Ensure programme and project governance frameworks are applied consistently across all work that is undertaken within the PMO.
- Develop the reporting templates and embed their use to deliver key structured updates to McLaren Racing Exec, Key stakeholders and leadership teams.
- Working closely with leadership teams to define strategic plans in all areas, identifying critical projects to be delivered along the way.
- Taking a leading role for the delivery of some business-critical projects as required , to ensure successful delivery and outcomes.
- Support the production of critical business cases for projects as required.
- Conducting and supporting with lessons learned exercises, documenting, and then implementing key action points from these reviews.
- Identify opportunities to improve project delivery efficiency and effectiveness within the PMO and throughout the wider business.
Job requirements
Knowledge, Skills and Experience:
- Extensive broad, multi-discipline experience in complex programme and project management.
- Multiple years’ experience of leadership and management of a PMO, with a proven track record of success in leading complex programmes and projects in a high pressure and fast paced environment.
- Strong experience in strategic thinking, business acumen, prioritisation of programmes of work in line with resource profiles, business demand and impact of outcomes.
- PRINCE2 / APM or equivalent qualification.
- Experts in MS Project and project planning tools.
- Industry experience in engineering, technical or infrastructure would be beneficial.
- Strong Change management knowledge and experience of developing standard practices, templates and frameworks in areas where project experience is less apparent. Demonstrated expertise in project management methodologies.
- Excellent risk management, mitigation, escalation, and reporting experience essential.
- Strong understanding of commercial and financial basics including Capital Investment, Operational costs, cashflow, product lifecycle management, business case development, resource allocation
- Highly skilled in producing various reports to a high standard for a variety of audiences – including RAG status, monthly progress, Quarterly reviews etc.
- Ability to build, develop and maintain strong relationships with a variety of stakeholders across all levels of the business.
- An engaging leader with demonstrated ability to motivate and influence a high performing team of project management professionals.
- Confident communicator with the ability to translate and present complex information succinctly to suit the audience and stakeholders of all levels.
- Ability to review and interpret operational and financial data and derive decisions and conclusions from it.
What can
McLaren offer?
We constantly strive to be better tomorrow than
we are today. Our ambition is to be the most pioneering and exhilarating racing
team in the world, and our collective task is to set the standards for high
performance in sport. We show up every day with energy and enthusiasm, ready to
play our part.
We encourage and support diversity, equity and
inclusion. We will actively promote a culture that values difference and
eliminates discrimination in our workplace.
McLaren Racing is based at the iconic McLaren
Technology Centre (MTC) near Woking.
Our state of the art, sustainable campus offers
many facilities including a gym, restaurant and indoor and outdoor break-out
areas, as well as direct access to park and common land. The MTC is connected
to Woking mainline station via regular shuttle buses, from which London
Waterloo is a 30 minute train ride.
We offer a comprehensive package of benefits
including private healthcare, car schemes, life insurance and generous pension
contributions.