Portfolio Delivery Manager

Hours: Full-time or 0.8 FTE role. ESRC have a wide range of policies to support work/life balance. As such, we welcome full time/part time/compressed hours applications for this role

Contract Type: X1 Open Ended (permanent) & X1 Fixed term until 31 March 2025

Location: Polaris House, Swindon, Wiltshire (hybrid working)

Grade: UKRI Band D

Proposed interview date: 22^nd - 24^th May 

Job Purpose 

You will form an important link between ESRC and stakeholders from our portfolios of research investments to deliver ESRC priorities. 

As part of a lively and dynamic team, committed to supporting academics at the forefront of economic and social research, you will work closely with the senior managers, your team head(s) and deputy directors to lead and take personal accountability for a select number of thematic portfolios. You will take a leading role on the commissioning and oversight of key new high-profile investments. You will ensure that outputs, outcomes, and impact are captured and optimised across portfolios; support senior ESRC staff to engage with a wide range of academic and broader stakeholder communities to catalyse research ideas across the economic and social sciences, and to drive forward their subsequent development and delivery. 

You will be involved in prioritising ideas, drafting documents, running funding processes, setting up grants, evaluation, and communications management. Additionally, you will deliver monitoring reports; support governance activities and take responsibility for project management and co-ordination.  

Key responsibilities 

• Managing the commissioning of new investments.
• Working across your team to aid the delivery of ESRC’s priorities.
• Working with ESRC senior staff to establish effective relationships with key strategic partners in your team’s area of work.
• Investment management of key investments within assigned portfolios, ensuring that outputs, outcomes, and impact reach their full potential by engaging with key collaborators.
• Working with the strategic research/portfolio leads and key collaborators to support, develop and prioritise new scientific ideas.
• Working closely across ESRC teams, ensuring high quality and timely project management of commissioning and governance activities.
• Involvement in the team’s corporate responsibilities, such as peer review for funding competitions. 

Essential Criteria:

• A degree/equivalent qualification in a relevant subject area or demonstrable equivalent level of knowledge, skills, and experience.
• Planning and organisational skills, including: an awareness of project management methods, the ability to support the co-ordination of project workstreams, the ability to effectively prioritise and manage complex activities with competing workloads, and taking ownership for delivery of expected outcomes whilst maintaining attention to detail.
• Ability to work collegiately and flexibly in a team, delivering a varied portfolio consistently in a timely manner. You will need to be responsive to changes and task manage the work of others to overcome challenges and successfully deliver expected outcomes.
• Sophisticated and engaging communication skills, using appropriate styles and methods to maximise impact and understanding.
• Experience of building effective working relationships with both internal and external collaborators (such as senior academics, policy makers, practitioners, or business partners) at varying seniority levels with the ability to influence and persuade.
• Analytical skills with the ability to evaluate, report, and act on complex information of various forms, including numerical data.

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