Head of ICT Portfolio Delivery

Salary: Up to £74,000
Contract: 12 Month Fixed Term Contract

Lead the delivery of technology that keeps critical services moving.

We're recruiting for an experienced ICT Portfolio Delivery leader to oversee the successful delivery of a substantial portfolio of digital and technology change within a large, complex organisation.

This is a senior leadership opportunity for someone who enjoys developing high-performing teams, driving delivery across a matrix environment, and ensuring strategic programmes are delivered successfully.

Rather than managing individual projects, you'll provide the leadership, governance and direction that enables your team to deliver a diverse portfolio of business-critical technology initiatives.

The Opportunity

You'll lead a team of experienced Project Delivery Managers, providing day-to-day leadership, removing delivery barriers and creating the environment for successful programme and project delivery.

Working closely with senior stakeholders across technology and the wider business, you'll oversee portfolio planning, governance, forecasting and performance reporting, ensuring priorities remain aligned with organisational objectives and resources are effectively managed.

The portfolio includes a wide range of ICT and digital change initiatives spanning enterprise applications, digital services, infrastructure, networking and wider technology transformation.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead, coach and develop a team of Project Delivery Managers, fostering a collaborative, high-performing delivery culture.
• Provide strategic oversight of a complex ICT change portfolio, ensuring successful delivery across multiple concurrent programmes and projects.
• Drive effective portfolio governance, reporting, forecasting and performance management.
• Work with senior stakeholders to prioritise investment, balance competing demands and support informed decision-making.
• Manage delivery within a complex matrix environment, influencing resource planning across multiple teams and business areas.
• Identify and remove delivery risks and blockers, supporting teams to achieve successful outcomes.
• Champion continuous improvement across project delivery practices, governance and portfolio management.

About You

You'll be an experienced portfolio or programme delivery leader with a proven track record of leading delivery teams within large, complex organisations.

You'll bring:

• Experience leading Project Managers, Programme Managers or Project Delivery Managers.
• A strong background overseeing complex ICT or digital change portfolios.
• Experience operating within a matrix-managed environment where delivery resources are shared across multiple functions.
• Excellent stakeholder management and influencing skills, with the ability to build trusted relationships at senior level.
• Strong portfolio governance, planning, forecasting and reporting experience.
• A collaborative leadership style with a passion for developing people and enabling successful delivery.
• A pragmatic approach to problem solving, with the confidence to make decisions and drive progress in complex environments.

Why Apply?

This is an opportunity to step into a highly visible leadership role where you'll shape the delivery of strategic technology change, lead an established delivery function and work with senior decision-makers to influence the future direction of a significant ICT portfolio.

If you're looking for a role where leadership, collaboration and strategic delivery are valued as highly as technical programme management, we'd love to hear from you.

Senior Commercial Procurement Specialist

Location: Hybrid – Predominantly Remote with occasional travel to Bicester as required
Contract: 9 Months
Day Rate: £600–£650 per day (Inside IR35)

The Opportunity

Our client is a large public sector organisation delivering critical operational services within a highly regulated environment. They are seeking an experienced Senior Commercial Procurement Specialist to lead complex procurement activity, provide strategic commercial advice and develop innovative commercial solutions across high-value programmes.

This is a senior commercial role requiring the ability to operate confidently with executive stakeholders while managing complex procurement activity within a complex regulatory landscape.

The Role

You will provide expert commercial and procurement advice to senior financial and operational leaders, taking ownership of complex, high-risk commercial activity from strategy through to contract award and ongoing commercial management.

Working across multiple strategic programmes, you will design and implement commercial strategies, lead challenging procurements, negotiate complex contractual arrangements and ensure compliance with public sector procurement legislation and governance requirements.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the development and delivery of commercial strategies for complex procurement programmes.

• Provide authoritative commercial advice to senior stakeholders and governance boards.

• Manage high-value, high-risk procurement activity throughout the full procurement lifecycle.

• Lead negotiations on complex contractual and commercial arrangements.

• Ensure procurement activity complies with relevant legislation, policy and governance requirements.

• Contribute to the continuous improvement of commercial processes, policies and best practice.

About You

You will be an experienced procurement and commercial professional with a proven track record of delivering strategic commercial outcomes within a complex public sector environment.

You'll be able to demonstrate:

• A minimum of five years' experience in a senior strategic procurement or commercial role.

• MCIPS qualification (or equivalent professional accreditation).

• WorldCC (formerly IACCM) or equivalent commercial contract management qualification would be advantageous.

• Significant experience leading complex public sector procurement and commercial programmes.

• Strong knowledge of UK public procurement legislation and commercial governance.

• Extensive experience negotiating and managing complex contracts.

• The ability to influence senior stakeholders and deliver commercially sound solutions within a highly regulated environment.

Security & Eligibility

Due to the nature of this role, applicants must have the unrestricted right to work in the UK without sponsorship.

Candidates must also be eligible to undergo the appropriate level of UK security vetting. Existing UK security clearance would be advantageous but is not essential.

If you're an experienced commercial procurement professional looking to make a strategic impact within a complex public sector organisation, we'd love to hear from you.

AWS Migration Technical Lead
6 Month Contract
Location: UK – Remote
Rate: £750 - £800 per day (Inside IR35)

Skills: AWS, Datacentre migration, VMware, Terraform, Ansible, Migration Planning

We are looking for a hands on AWS Migration Technical Lead to take ownership of a major datacentre exit programme.

This is a delivery-focused technical role for someone who has personally led complex production migrations from traditional datacentre environments into AWS. You will work alongside existing engineering teams, assess the automation already in place, identify what is usable and build or improve anything required to complete the migration safely and on time.

This is not an enterprise architecture, cloud strategy or programme management position. You will be expected to get into the technical detail, make practical decisions, unblock engineering teams and lead critical migration and cutover activity from the front.

The programme involves multiple production workloads being migrated in parallel, including a critical platform serving more than 100 customers. All in-scope environments must be migrated ahead of a fixed datacentre exit deadline.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the technical delivery of datacentre-to-AWS migrations across multiple production environments.
• Work directly with engineering teams to plan, build and execute migrations.
• Review existing migration tooling and automation to determine what is production-ready.
• Extend, repair or rebuild automation where gaps are identified.
• Provide hands-on technical leadership across several parallel migration workstreams.
• Establish practical technical standards without creating unnecessary governance or delays.
• Make informed decisions around migration sequencing, re-platforming and technical risk.
• Identify and resolve infrastructure, application, licensing and dependency issues.
• Support teams that are less experienced with AWS, providing guidance and technical uplift.
• Own detailed cutover planning, including networking, DNS, data, access, validation and rollback.
• Lead migration rehearsals and production cutovers.
• Ensure customer-facing production services are migrated without avoidable disruption.
• Escalate technical and commercial blockers clearly to senior stakeholders.
• Provide concise reporting on progress, risks, decisions and delivery confidence.
• Support the safe decommissioning of legacy datacentre infrastructure following migration.

Essential Experience

• Proven hands-on experience delivering complex datacentre-to-cloud migrations.
• Strong production-level AWS experience.
• Previous ownership of migration delivery from discovery and planning through to cutover.
• Strong knowledge of VMware and traditional datacentre infrastructure.
• Experience reviewing and improving existing infrastructure automation.
• Hands-on experience with Terraform, Ansible or equivalent automation tooling.
• Strong understanding of networking, DNS, access, data movement and rollback planning.
• Experience migrating business-critical production applications with strict availability requirements.
• Ability to assess whether workloads should be rehosted, re-platformed or otherwise remediated.
• Strong troubleshooting skills across infrastructure and application dependencies.
• Experience coordinating multiple engineering teams working on parallel migrations.
• Confidence making technical decisions under time pressure.
• Clear communication with engineers, delivery teams and senior stakeholders.
• Willingness to travel occasionally for key workshops, rehearsals or production cutovers.

Desirable Experience

• Experience delivering large-scale datacentre exit programmes.
• Migration of hosted software or SaaS platforms serving multiple customers.
• Experience working with public-sector, healthcare or other regulated production systems.
• Knowledge of both AWS and Azure migration environments.
• Experience supporting teams through cloud capability uplift.
• Familiarity with licensing, commercial and third-party constraints during migration programmes.

This Role Will Suit Someone Who

• Leads by doing rather than producing strategy documents.
• Is comfortable reviewing partially completed work and forming an independent technical view.
• Can move between high-level migration sequencing and detailed engineering problems.
• Remains calm during high-pressure cutovers.
• Knows when to fix, rebuild, escalate or simplify.
• Can provide technical direction without becoming a bottleneck.

https://www.civica.com/en-gb/product-pages/case-management-software/ 

6 month contract

£600 - £650 per day (inside ir35)

remote - travel into London

Complaints / Case management software used across public and private sector

Role overview

This is now best viewed as a Business Analyst role supporting Civica’s legal case management product, rather than a Product Manager position.

The main focus is customer discovery and requirements gathering. The successful person will build relationships with around 105 users of the product, speak to them regularly, understand how they use the system and investigate where the real problems sit.

A big part of the role will be getting beyond what users initially ask for. They need someone who can ask the right questions, understand the underlying issue and document clear business requirements.

What they will actually do

They will:

• Own the relationship with the user community.
• Run fact-finding conversations, interviews and workshops.
• Understand legal workflows, terminology and user needs.
• Identify pain points and gaps in the current product.
• Capture and document business requirements clearly.
• Map processes and user journeys where needed.
• Present findings back to Product and Engineering.
• Provide the evidence and context that helps shape the roadmap.

They will not own the roadmap and will not be making the final prioritisation decisions. Their job is to produce strong analysis and requirements that the Product Manager and Engineering teams can act on.

Ideal background

The strongest candidates are likely to be:

• Business Analysts from legal software or case management companies.
• BAs working internally within law firms or legal departments.
• Legal Systems Analysts.
• Legal Technology or Legal Operations professionals with strong BA experience.
• BAs from complaints, regulatory or public-sector case management environments.

They do not necessarily need to come from a software vendor. A BA from a law firm could be very relevant if they have worked directly with legal users on systems, workflows and process improvements.

Key qualities

The biggest priorities are:

• Excellent communication and stakeholder management.
• High empathy and strong listening skills.
• Confidence dealing with a large and varied user group.
• Ability to work through vague or conflicting feedback.
• Strong requirements gathering and documentation.
• Knowledge of legal language and legal working practices.
• Experience acting as the bridge between users and technical teams.

What to avoid

I would avoid:

• Pure Product Managers looking for roadmap ownership.
• Generic BAs with no legal, case management or regulated workflow experience.
• Legal professionals with no systems or business analysis background.
• Technical BAs who are strong on APIs and integrations but weak with users.
• Delivery-focused Product Owners who mainly manage backlogs and ceremonies.

Simple summary

It is a customer-facing Business Analyst role for a legal case management product. They will work closely with around 105 users, investigate how they use the system, identify the real business problems and turn those findings into clear requirements for Product and Engineering. They will influence the roadmap, but they will not own it.

STAGE 2

Business Development Manager

Location: UK, Remote

Salary £70-80,000 basic, Car Allowance & excellent OTE

My client are a leading Business Transformation Consultancy with a 15-year track record of delivering award-winning change across the UK public sector, nonprofit, and mid-market organisations, specialising in Finance, HR and Digital Transformation, combining deep sector expertise, cutting-edge SaaS technology (ERP, HCM, Financials), and proprietary IP such as our BTaaS (Business Transformation as a Service) model and industry accelerators for Public Sector, Non-Profit & Commercial organisations head quartered in the UK.

Key Responsibilities:

• Identify and cultivate new business opportunities within their target Markets leveraging your industry expertise and network.
• Develop and maintain strong relationships with key stakeholders, understanding their unique challenges and needs.
• Collaborate with internal teams to tailor solutions that address the specific requirements of clients.
• Drive the sales process from lead generation to closure, ensuring a seamless experience for our clients.Stay informed about industry trends and market developments

Key Skills:

• 5+ years’ experience in B2B new business sales of ERP, HCM, or Financial SaaS/consulting
• Proven track record selling to the UK Public Sector or Nonprofit organisations
• Expertise in complex, consultative solution selling and multi-year transformation programmes.
• Ability to manage a full sales cycle: from prospecting to close.
• Comfortable with targeting quotas and working independently in a remote setting.

• Devops cand is leaving at the end of the month
• More infra architect – but more technical
• Still hands on – cloud implementation, but foot in solution architect role
• Key is hands on building of a cloud – need design and hands on
• Shawn is pure design – design
• Azure & AWS – focus on AWS
• Talking to Dave – Technical Director –
• Ideally to move from tech hands on into an architect – more junior end
• Carlisle and Exeter – beyond 2 hours – within 1 hour
• Ansible and Terraform
• Red hat extensive
• Openshift cluster
• Good if some understanding of automation
• Quite customer facing – working with Shawn – and build out architecute frameworks
• 1 / 2 projects
• Some internal work – test and development environments
• Common spaces that
• Person leaving on £68k – wants to give us a guide
• 2pm weds

MACS is a specialist IT consultancy providing professional services around enterprise IBM platforms, including infrastructure, asset management and facilities-management solutions. They support customers with solution design, implementation, integration, upgrades and ongoing technical delivery across cloud and hybrid environments.

• IBM Maximo Application Suite – enterprise asset management and maintenance.
• IBM TRIRIGA – facilities, workplace and real-estate management.
• IBM Control Desk, now generally positioned as Maximo IT – IT service and IT asset management.
• IBM Envizi – sustainability and environmental data management.

It’s a client-facing Cloud Platform Consultant role, combining solution design and architecture with hands-on delivery across cloud, hybrid and infrastructure projects. You’d work on secure customer environments, supporting the infrastructure behind enterprise IBM platforms such as Maximo and TRIRIGA, with a strong focus on AWS, Terraform, Ansible, Linux and container technologies.

Core technologies

The strongest technical areas are:

• AWS — especially VPCs, IAM, EC2, networking, monitoring, resilience and secure infrastructure design. - have you designed and built and AWS environment?
• Azure — useful, but AWS sounds like the preference rather than both being mandatory.
• Linux, ideally Red Hat.
• OpenShift and Kubernetes — cluster build, configuration and troubleshooting. - have you built and configured? or mainly deployed applications?
• Terraform — creating modules and provisioning environments, not just running existing code. - created from scratch
• Ansible — building roles/playbooks and automating server or platform configuration. - what have you configured?
• Hybrid infrastructure — connecting cloud to on-premise environments.
• Security and networking — IAM, VPNs, DNS, certificates, encryption, hardening, firewalls and zero-trust principles.
• CI/CD and monitoring — Jenkins/GitLab and tools such as CloudWatch or Grafana.
• Architecture documentation including HLDs, LLDs, design decisions and operational handover material.

MACS mainly works with asset-intensive organisations—businesses and public bodies with large estates, equipment fleets, infrastructure or facilities to manage.

Their main markets are:

• Government and defence, including work with the Defence Infrastructure Organisation
• Facilities management and property/estates
• Manufacturing
• Transport
• Utilities
• Oil and gas
• Healthcare
• Life sciences

The common thread is organisations using platforms such as IBM Maximo and TRIRIGA to manage physical assets, maintenance, facilities, property and operational infrastructure

This is essentially a senior client-facing managed services role, responsible for a portfolio of live Civica systems after they have been implemented—for example, DORS.

They are not managing the original build programme. They are making sure the ongoing service is stable, meets its contractual SLAs, keeps the customer satisfied and remains commercially profitable.

What are they actually responsible for?

They will sit between:

• The Central Government customer
• Civica’s Service Desk and technical Service Engineers
• Suppliers and offshore teams
• Civica’s commercial, finance and sales teams
• More junior Service Delivery Managers, where applicable

Typical responsibilities would include:

• Leading customer service reviews
• Reporting on incidents, SLAs, risks, service performance and improvements
• Acting as the senior escalation point when the Service Desk or engineering teams cannot resolve something
• Coordinating technical teams rather than personally fixing AWS or Azure issues
• Managing service finances, invoicing, renewals and profitability
• Transitioning new functionality or projects into business-as-usual support
• Pricing smaller enhancements and change requests of up to £150,000
• Making sure holidays, sickness and resource gaps do not affect service delivery

It is therefore a mixture of service delivery, account management, operational governance and commercial management.

Who are they managing?

The specification is slightly contradictory.

The hiring notes say:

No direct line management in the role.

But the generic job description repeatedly refers to:

• Line management of Service Delivery Managers
• Managing teams of Service Engineers
• Approving timesheets
• Managing absences
• Reviewing reports produced by other SDMs

My interpretation is that the hiring manager’s note should take priority. For this particular vacancy, they probably do not currently have permanent direct reports.

They will still be expected to:

• Matrix-manage Service Engineers and technical resources
• Coordinate people allocated to their services
• Guide or mentor less experienced Service Delivery Managers
• Challenge teams when service performance drops
• Potentially cover some senior oversight of other SDMs

So I would describe it as significant operational leadership without necessarily having a formal team reporting into them.

I would not discount someone without formal line-management experience, as long as they have successfully led technical teams through influence and matrix management.

Why do they need ITIL?

ITIL is relevant because this is about managing a live production service in a structured way.

They need to understand areas such as:

• Incident and major incident management
• Problem management
• Change management
• Service transition
• Continual service improvement
• Service-level management
• Escalation processes
• Service reviews and reporting

They do not necessarily need to recite ITIL terminology or be an ITIL expert. However, they need to understand how a managed service should operate and how incidents, changes and service improvements are governed.

The qualification is only preferred. Strong practical experience in an ITIL-aligned MSP or software support environment should be more important than holding the certificate.

The profile I would target

I would look for someone from an IT services company, MSP, government supplier or software vendor who has managed several externally contracted services.

The key experience is:

• Public-sector or regulated customer management
• SC clearance
• Owning live application or cloud-based managed services
• Strong SLA and service-review experience
• Senior customer escalation management
• Matrix leadership of engineers
• Service transition from projects into BAU
• Financial and commercial ownership
• Enough AWS or Azure understanding to hold credible conversations with engineers and customers

The cloud point sounds deliberately light-touch. They are not looking for a cloud engineer. They want someone who understands what engineers are discussing and can manage a cloud-hosted service credibly.

In one line: they need someone who can act as the accountable owner of several live Civica customer services, keeping the customer, technical delivery and commercial performance under control.

• Devops cand is leaving at the end of the month
• More infra architect – but more technical
• Still hands on – cloud implementation, but foot in solution architect role
• Key is hands on building of a cloud – need design and hands on
• Shawn is pure design – design
• Azure & AWS – focus on AWS
• Talking to Dave – Technical Director –
• Ideally to move from tech hands on into an architect – more junior end
• Carlisle and Exeter – beyond 2 hours – within 1 hour
• Ansible and Terraform
• Red hat extensive
• Openshift cluster
• Good if some understanding of automation
• Quite customer facing – working with Shawn – and build out architecute frameworks
• 1 / 2 projects
• Some internal work – test and development environments
• Common spaces that
• Person leaving on £68k – wants to give us a guide
• 2pm weds

MACS is a specialist IT consultancy providing professional services around enterprise IBM platforms, including infrastructure, asset management and facilities-management solutions. They support customers with solution design, implementation, integration, upgrades and ongoing technical delivery across cloud and hybrid environments.

• IBM Maximo Application Suite – enterprise asset management and maintenance.
• IBM TRIRIGA – facilities, workplace and real-estate management.
• IBM Control Desk, now generally positioned as Maximo IT – IT service and IT asset management.
• IBM Envizi – sustainability and environmental data management.

It’s a client-facing Cloud Platform Consultant role, combining solution design and architecture with hands-on delivery across cloud, hybrid and infrastructure projects. You’d work on secure customer environments, supporting the infrastructure behind enterprise IBM platforms such as Maximo and TRIRIGA, with a strong focus on AWS, Terraform, Ansible, Linux and container technologies.

Core technologies

The strongest technical areas are:

• AWS — especially VPCs, IAM, EC2, networking, monitoring, resilience and secure infrastructure design. - have you designed and built and AWS environment?
• Azure — useful, but AWS sounds like the preference rather than both being mandatory.
• Linux, ideally Red Hat.
• OpenShift and Kubernetes — cluster build, configuration and troubleshooting. - have you built and configured? or mainly deployed applications?
• Terraform — creating modules and provisioning environments, not just running existing code. - created from scratch
• Ansible — building roles/playbooks and automating server or platform configuration. - what have you configured?
• Hybrid infrastructure — connecting cloud to on-premise environments.
• Security and networking — IAM, VPNs, DNS, certificates, encryption, hardening, firewalls and zero-trust principles.
• CI/CD and monitoring — Jenkins/GitLab and tools such as CloudWatch or Grafana.
• Architecture documentation including HLDs, LLDs, design decisions and operational handover material.

MACS mainly works with asset-intensive organisations—businesses and public bodies with large estates, equipment fleets, infrastructure or facilities to manage.

Their main markets are:

• Government and defence, including work with the Defence Infrastructure Organisation
• Facilities management and property/estates
• Manufacturing
• Transport
• Utilities
• Oil and gas
• Healthcare
• Life sciences

The common thread is organisations using platforms such as IBM Maximo and TRIRIGA to manage physical assets, maintenance, facilities, property and operational infrastructure

CV link - Job Openings