Assistant Director of Improvement & Change
Assistant Director of Improvement & Change - Job Description & Person Specification
£67,938 - £86,682pa | Fixed-Term 2 years| Closing date 24.02.21
About us
Our vision is for Newham to be a place where our residents are able to live healthy, happy and well lives. Proud to be home to one of the youngest and most diverse communities in the country, with 72% of the population from BAME communities, contributing to 220 languages being spoken in the area. We are the first borough to put the health, happiness and wellbeing of our residents as our primary measures of success, as part of our innovative and critically important Towards a Better Newham: Our Recovery and Reorientation Strategy.
You will be joining Newham at a time of significant change, as we continue to review, refine and redesign our operating model, how we work, and how we work collaboratively with our residents, communities, partners and businesses to transform our organisation. We want to make the best of our learning and successes in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic working with our residents, communities and businesses and build this into a bold and significant transformation of how Newham works.
About the Role
In the context of our ambitions, we are currently looking for three experienced senior leaders to join us as Assistant Directors of Improvement and Change, who will work in partnership with the broad range of services, directorates and senior leaders to design and deliver specific portfolios of transformation and change across the organisation that cover either;
- People Transformation (Adult Social Care, Children’s Social Care, Brighter Futures, and Public Health)
- Place Transformation (Inclusive Economy and Housing, Environment and Sustainable Transport)
- Cross-Cutting Corporate Transformation (Future Newham, Digital Transformation, Business Support, Resident Experience, and support transformation within the People, Performance and Policy Directorate, in addition to Resources)
· Please note your preferred area within your application.
As part of the newly established delivery function, within the Change and Insight Directorate, you will be joining at a critical time for Newham, gaining the opportunity to shape how the organisation approaches change initiatives. The function is focussed on building an innovative and cutting-edge service, focussed on tackling substantial and complex challenges in partnership with a wide-range of work streams across the organisation. The new delivery function will work in close partnership with the broad range of services that sit within the Change and Insight Directorate, assembling multi-disciplinary teams from a broad range of specialisms to support the delivery of change in your areas.
Sitting on the Change and Insight management team, the roles are accountable for guiding and steering transformational strategy, the Council’s overarching transformation portfolio, and the future shape of the organisation. Acting as ‘Change Agents’ for your respective portfolios and Directorates, these roles are essential in guiding the strategic portfolio of programmes and projects working closely with the Council’s senior leadership and senior members to help deliver the ambitions of our ‘Towards a Better Newham‘ strategy – while ensuring we remain financially sustainable as an organisation.
Ultimately these roles take responsibility for directly managing a team of programme and project managers within the delivery function, as well as drawing on resources from a wide-range of multi-disciplinary teams, whilst developing transformation programmes and future strategy for critical areas of the organisation. Amidst the current situation the roles are pivotal to building on the best of the organisation’s response to the COVID-19 crisis, ensuring we ‘build back better’ into the future plans for transforming ways of working across Newham.
About You
With a key focus on change management, you will have a proven track record in leading major reforms and transformation programmes that change how organisation’s fundamentally work in accordance with best practice methodologies - successfully delivering complex projects or programmes within a similar environment.
You will be comfortable with service design with the ability to quickly identify and implement opportunities to share space with residents, communities and businesses; reducing our overall office footprint in line with our corporate plan priorities and community wealth building ethos.
You will have proven experience in delivering the positive impact of change initiatives, being able to evidence the use of qualitative and qualitative data to measure the performance of services, devising appropriate development strategies either in a public or private sector environment.
For more information about the skills we are looking for, click here to view the Job Description & Person Specification. If you would like an informal conversation about the role(s) please contact James Partis on james.partis@newham.gov.uk.
Additional Information
The London Borough of Newham is a Disability Confident employer. Candidates who declare that they have a disability in accordance with the Equality Act 2010 and meet the essential criteria as specified in the Job Profile will be guaranteed an interview.
Priority consideration on all advertised roles will be given to London Borough of Newham Redeployees.
The London Borough of Newham is committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children, young people and vulnerable groups and expects staff and volunteers to share this commitment.
Please be aware that a Disclosure and Barring Scheme (DBS) check will be required for any position with access to these groups under the provision of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.
In addition, the Authority reserves the right to request employees undertake a basic disclosure check (Disclosure Scotland) where required for the role this includes anyone who has access to (or information obtained directly from) a government database or has a GCSX account. These posts will be required to have a Basic Disclosure Scotland check as per the requirements of BPSS (Baseline Personnel Security Standards).
Please attach your supporting statement, explaining in no more than x2 A4 sides why and how you meet the criteria for this role.