Portfolio Capabilities Lead

Job Description

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About the role

Delivery Performance exists to assure the success of the Digital portfolio by strengthening quality and predictability through clear methodology, outcome measurement, and continuous improvement. It builds organisational memory of effective best‑practice standards, improves and simplifies how teams deliver work, and supports programmes with delivery excellence and independent assurance to give transparent oversight of portfolio health and capacity, and address risks before they become issues.

The role – The Portfolio Capabilities Lead leads the combined DMS Design and Delivery Performance Operations functions, ensuring we are optimally set up with the operational foundations to oversee the Digital Portfolio, with reporting that supports execution of the Delivery Performance mission, drives decisions and action, and the right tooling capability to underpin this. The role sets direction and ensures seamless integration across DMS Tooling design, delivery methodology, Delivery Performance operations, quality assurance and reporting. It also manages the Delivery vector roadmap to ensure that we deliver our mission within the Digital change journey, underpinning BT’s strategy.

This role acts the Product Lead for the Digital Delivery Management System, designed to make governance easy and effective enabling the Delivery Performance function to systematically track whether the Digital Portfolio is on track for schedule, cost and quality, enabling early intervention on risks, and driving up systematic integrity and quality in for quality out. The role owns the strategic evolution of how the Delivery Management System operates, ensuring it reflects the organisation’s delivery frameworks and standards, governance requirements, and is set up to enable reliable and recognised delivery performance reporting to underpin Delivery governance. It also oversees the design and operation of transparent, robust, and trusted reporting for Programme Leaders, Digital and Group leadership.

Why it’s important – Digital oversees a large, complex ecosystem of interdependent programmes, products and change initiatives spanning every part of BT, requiring clear delivery methods, reliable tooling and transparent portfolio reporting to operate effectively. The Portfolio Capabilities Lead leads the organisation’s Delivery Management System (DMS) and runs Operations for Delivery Performance, bringing together capabilities that enable us to effectively oversee the Digital Portfolio to deliver predictably, transparently and at scale.

This role shapes how Digital transparently understand and reports delivery across Digital, ensuring tooling and reporting operate as one integrated system, moving from periodic reporting to continuous sensing and focusing leadership attention where it is truly needed. It is a pivotal role that ensures BT’s DMS becomes the backbone of predictable delivery — supporting change-controlled baseline plans, end‑to‑end visibility, early risk detection, consistent ways of working and data‑driven decision‑making for Digital, Group, and ExCo-level stakeholders.

What you’ll be doing

• Oversees effective management and governance of the Delivery vector roadmap in alignment with Group assurance processes
• Owns the end‑to‑end portfolio capability strategy and Delivery Management System, ensuring tooling and reporting operate as an integrated system, maximising transparency and automation.
• Leads the business design and implementation of a tooling-enabled Delivery Management System providing real‑time insight on demand quality and integrity, schedule, cost and delivery health across the Digital portfolio
• Leads the design and continuous evolution of how delivery governance processes operate across supporting tooling, ensuring alignment to PPM and LPM principles and enterprise delivery practices
• Responsible for ensuring that the DMS data flow is seamless, aligned to the lifecycle and standards, providing trustworthy portfolio data foundations.
• Leverages deep knowledge and stakeholder relationships to unblock disparity in unit requirements, supporting commonality and simplicity in processes that underpin tooling configuration
• Directs Delivery Performance business reporting across Digital, CFUs, Group and ExCo, ensuring accuracy, transparency and clear insight into delivery health and trends.
• Oversees Quality Assurance review scheduling, management, action tracking and follow‑through, ensuring programmes adhere to Delivery Performance standards and frameworks.
• Ensures problem themes, systemic risks and improvement opportunities across the Digital Portfolio are identified, analysed and translated into actionable interventions.
• Shapes and maintains PPM/LPM practices, portfolio workflows and guardrails embedded across delivery tooling and the DMS, to codify the Delivery standards and enable common measurement across the Delivery Metrics programme
• Oversees the single-source-of-truth content for DMS-related processes, standards and design documentation across Wayfinder and connected assets.
• Acts as the senior voice of DMS in cross‑functional forums, driving alignment, clarifying trade‑offs and ensuring decisions land cleanly and are adopted.
• Builds strong BT‑wide relationships across Digital, CFUs, Operations, Engineering, Finance and Group, to drive cohesive adoption of DMS.

Essential Skills / Experience

• Deep expertise in PPM and LPM disciplines, including portfolio governance, and supporting tooling, flow‑based planning, sequencing and value‑aligned prioritisation.
• Strong knowledge and experience with Jira
• Deep understanding of the Software development lifecycle
• Strong delivery, portfolio management, and business analysis skills and knowledge, including fluency in metrics such as earned value, flow efficiency and productivity.
• Excellent stakeholder management and influence across highly complex, senior, and cross‑functional environments.
• Strategic problem‑solving skills, with the ability to interpret delivery trends, identify systemic issues and drive holistic solutions.
• Ability to lead multidisciplinary teams, manage performance and build capability.

Desirable Skills / Experience

• Experience leading Digital and IT teams
• Knowledge of all delivery methodologies in Digital to support effective planning, and how they may vary
• Significant experience in enterprise PPM tooling and end‑to‑end design ownership
• Deep expertise in Atlassian Jira
• Experience leveraging agentic AI capability to improve efficiency and quality of portfolio management outcomes
• Experience in transformation (across cost, productivity and growth) – identification, investment scoping, business casing and implementation
• Demonstrated leadership of large‑scale portfolios or delivery systems within complex organisations.
• Experience running business reporting for senior leadership, including C‑suite or ExCo‑level audiences.
• Prior leadership of delivery planning and operations or similar functions
• Consulting skills and experience

Our Package

BT Group is the UK’s leading communications group and the holding company behind some of the country’s most recognised brands – including BT, EE, Openreach and Plusnet. Our purpose is as simple as it is ambitious: we connect for good. Our customers include consumers, small, medium and large businesses, public sector organisations and other communications providers.

BT Group’s role is about setting direction, unlocking value and creating the conditions for our brands and businesses to thrive.

Having come through the most capital-intensive phase of our fibre investment, our focus now is on what comes next – simplifying how we operate, using technology and AI to work smarter, and organising ourselves to serve customers better and grow sustainably. Group teams shape strategy, policy, brand, capital allocation and transformation, helping the whole organisation perform at its best.

We have a singular culture that unites all our people: we are customer-first challengers, who are committed, clear and connected. These behaviours unite us as one team to deliver for our colleagues, our customers, our stakeholders and the country. Joining BT Group means working at the heart of a business that matters to the UK, with the opportunity to shape decisions, influence outcomes and help set the future course of one of the country’s most important companies.