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Service Improvement and Performance Lead

The University of Manchester - Registrar Secretary and COO Office

Location: Manchester
Salary: £59,966 to £71,566 per annum, depending on relevant experience. Grade 8
Hours: Full Time
Contract Type: Permanent
Placed On: 22nd December 2025
Closes: 12th January 2026
Job Ref: PSX-030468

The opportunity

As our Service Improvement & Performance Lead, you’ll guide the University towards a future where improvement is part of everyday work, not a special project or a one-off initiative. You’ll be making a meaningful difference to the way the University operates, by influencing how thousands of colleagues’ experience, deliver and improve services every day.

The Service Improvement & Performance Lead is a connector, catalyst and enabler helping to bring clarity where there is complexity, shared purpose where there are silos, and momentum where change needs unlocking.

  • Imagine yourself walking into a leadership meeting and helping them translate broad ambitions into clear, measurable, user-focused service improvements that genuinely change staff and student experiences or.
  • Co-designing a service improvement framework that becomes the foundation for how Professional Services continuously enhance the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of the services they deliver for users.
  • You might be building a community of practice, bringing together cross-functional teams and individuals from across the University who look to you for guidance, coaching and tools to make their services better.
  • Through your ability to tell stories with data, you will enable senior leaders to make informed decisions with confidence because they can see performance clearly for the first time.
  • You’ll support teams as they adopt new practices around user experience, continuous improvement, automation, and AI helping them build confidence and capability.
  • By delivering smoother processes, clearer accountability, better user experiences, and a stronger sense of “One University” working towards shared goals, your work will resonate with users and be felt across the University.

Who we’re looking for

  • You know what it feels like to work in a large, complex organisation where nothing changes unless people believe in the direction of travel.
  • You’ve learned that progress comes from conversations, trust and clarity of purpose not from process maps alone, and you’re at your best when you’re helping people make sense of complexity and see a way forward they didn’t see before.
  • You’ve spent time improving services or shaping performance in a way that genuinely made things better for users: smoother processes, clearer journeys, more meaningful outcomes.
  • You know the tools, methods and frameworks for service improvement. More importantly, you know how to use them in a way that fits the context, the people and the culture.
  • Data doesn’t intimidate you - you’re data-driven. You can look at a set of metrics and quickly spot what they’re really saying.
  • You’re also someone who brings value in rooms where decisions get made.
  • You can brief senior leaders with confidence, frame a problem so that the path becomes clearer, and help groups with different perspectives find common ground.
  • You connect dots across teams, disciplines and priorities helping people move from “this is complicated” to “this is possible.”

Most importantly, you bring:

  • Curiosity and an openness to new ways of working
  • Confidence navigating ambiguity
  • A coaching mindset
  • A commitment to user-centred, people-centred improvement
  • The ability to make complexity understandable
  • A collaborative spirit rooted in our values of inclusion, respect, integrity, compassion and cooperation

If you meet some of these qualities and feel energised by our mission, we encourage you to apply. We don’t expect perfection, just potential and purpose.

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