Assistant Director, Strategic Portfolio & Planning

Are you a strategic leader with the vision and influence to shape institutional priorities, investment decisions, and organisational performance?

Join The Open University as Assistant Director, Strategic Portfolio & Planning and play a pivotal role in ensuring the University has effective approaches to strategic prioritisation, planning, performance, and risk management. This is an opportunity to influence executive decision-making at the highest level and help drive the long-term success of one of the world's leading distance-learning institutions.

About the Role

The Assistant Director, Strategic Portfolio & Planning is accountable for ensuring the University has effective approaches to strategic prioritisation, planning, performance and risk. The successful candidate will provide strong institutional leadership on how choices about the funding of strategic initiatives are framed, prioritised & evidenced, enabling effective executive and governance decision‑making.

The role provides overall leadership of the team, holding accountability for collective performance, integration, coherence and outputs, while Senior Managers within the team retain ownership and remain accountable for the substance, analysis and professional judgement within their remits.

Key Responsibilities

• Strategic prioritisation and investment leadership: Lead the University’s strategic prioritisation and portfolio level investment processes, ensuring high quality options, explicit trade offs and decision ready recommendations for senior decision makers.
• Business planning and review: Lead the integrated business planning and review cycle, ensuring a clear line of sight between strategy, priorities, resources and outcomes, and improving value while reducing unnecessary process burden.
• Performance and risk frameworks: Lead the design, continuous improvement and effective use of performance and risk management frameworks so that insight actively informs executive oversight, prioritisation and institutional learning.
• Integration and assurance across the strategic portfolio and planning team: Set direction and standards, join up planning, investment, performance and risk, and provide quality assurance on high impact, cross team outputs, acting as an integrator rather than gatekeeper.
• Team leadership and ways of working: Provide overall leadership of the team in a way that strengthens Senior Manager ownership and confidence, while avoiding unnecessary management layers.

About You

Essential:

• Experience leading enterprise-level processes for the prioritisation of funding for strategic initiatives.
• Strong experience in strategic planning within a complex organisation.
• Proven ability to produce high-quality strategic analysis and materials for senior audiences.
• Excellent stakeholder engagement and credibility at senior levels.
• Strong coaching and people leadership capability, with experience developing team maturity and performance.
• Demonstrated ability to simplify processes and remove duplication.
• High integrity, resilience and comfort operating with ambiguity.

Desirable:

• Understanding of Higher Education or public sector strategy.
• Knowledge of performance and risk frameworks.

Why Join Us?

At The Open University, we're committed to transforming lives through accessible education and innovation. This is a unique opportunity to influence strategic direction at an institution with a global reputation, helping to ensure that resources, investment, performance, and risk are aligned to deliver our mission and ambitions.

Visit the full advert on our Careers site via the 'Apply' button above to learn more about the role, criteria, benefits, and how to apply.

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