Planning PMO Manager

Sainsbury's Supermarkets Ltd; London; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 80,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading company in retail is seeking a PMO Manager to enhance efficiency and governance in its tech portfolio. This role involves overseeing PMO functions, leading a team, and driving process improvements to support strategic objectives. The ideal candidate will have substantial experience in program management and a proactive approach to leadership, ensuring the successful delivery of initiatives.

Benefits

Colleague discount of up to 15%

Pension scheme and life cover

Performance-related bonus up to 20%

Annual holiday allowance and additional holiday purchases

Season ticket and car loans

Employee Assistance Programme

Private healthcare

Up to 26 weeks' pay for maternity/adoption leave

Up to 4 weeks' pay for paternity leave

Qualifications

• Experience in a PMO manager or lead role is essential.
• Strong track record in program/portfolio management within a fast-paced environment.
• Proven ability to lead PMO functions effectively.

Responsibilities

• Oversee the PMO function, ensuring adherence to governance practices.
• Drive efficiency improvements across processes and reporting.
• Manage tools and support strategic initiatives within the organization.

Skills

Leadership

Program/Portfolio Management

Data Analysis

Process Improvement

Communication

Tools

Atlassian (JIRA, JPD)

Planview

Job description

Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: London Store Support Centre and Home, London, EC1M 6HA
Contract type: Permanent
Business area: Sainsbury's Tech
Closing date: 30 June 2025
Requisition ID: 400002690

We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you at Sainsbury’s. Think about the scale it takes for us to feed the nation. The level of data, transactions and variety it involves. Then you’ll realise that ours is a modern software engineering environment because it has to be. We’ve made serious investment into a Tech Academy and into setting standards and principles. We iterate, learn, experiment and push ways of working such as Agile, Scrum and XP. So you can look forward to awesome opportunities in everything from AI to reusable tech.

In a nutshell:

This role leads Portfolio Planning - orchestrating the Quarterly Portfolio Planning Process, maintaining an aggregated view of the Portfolio Plan & Cross-Portfolio dependencies and interpreting planning data to draw out actionable insights and identify contentions.

Experience in planning using the Portfolio toolsets such as Atlassian (JIRA, JPD) and Planview will be an advantage

This role will work within the Portfolio Office to drive the PMO function as a Service to all Programmes and change activities. The role will focus on the core deliverables of our Operating model, driving efficiencies of processes and tooling, consistency where needed and pursuing the objective of ‘just enough’ governance.

What I am accountable for:

• Managing and ensuring adherence to appropriate and useful delivery methodologies and gate processes to drive the ‘just enough’ governance objective
• Driving efficiency of processes to ensure all activities add value and continual improvements identified
• Managing one or more core PMO functions: RAIDD management, Planning, Governance, Dependencies and Reporting, ensuring services are robust, adding value and continually inspected for opportunities for improvement
• Supporting on tooling evaluation, decisions and roll out working with change enablement team to land internal changes robustly
• Supporting the provision of tooling and processes to support a full ‘end-to-end’ view of all Sainsbury’s tech strategic initiatives to improve visibility and inform decision making through the provision of actionable status information, time plans, risks and interdependencies • Facilitating forums, ensuring the governance framework is upheld and adapted as needed
• Managing and monitoring KPI’s to measure performance and progress to plans at all levels of aggregation • Conducting project audits, share lessons learned, and highlight key areas of interest
• Represent PMO and technology supporting other divisions with PMO best practice and set up

What I need to know Essential:

• Experience in a PMO manager or lead role
• Proven leadership and team management experience
• Strong track record in programme/portfolio management within a retail or similarly fast-paced environment, with a solid understanding of managing shifting deadlines, multiple initiatives, and critical paths
• A highly organised, process driven approach to managing key Governance and Planning artefacts
• Experienced in data analysis and report preparation

What I need to show:

• Proven ability to lead PMO functions
• A positive approach to change
• A solution-focused mindset with creativity and adaptability
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to navigate complex corporate governance environments

Our Valued Behaviours are our common DNA that every colleague should live by and provide the benchmark for how we deliver our goals/individual contribution, and how we relate to other colleagues in the organisation.

Own it :

• Do what you say you’ll do
• Don’t walk past a problem

Make it better:

• Improve things for your customer
• Spot opportunities to simplify
• Walk in the shoes of your colleagues and customers
• Show care and respect to everyone In addition to role modelling the Valued Behaviours, all People Managers should be consistently driving all four Leadership Performance Expectations, all the time. The Leadership Performance Expectations are:

Obsessed with the customer:

• Use data and insight to understand customer needs and solve customer problems
• Use our Purpose to support decision making everyday
• Role model living our customer commitments and guide teams to do the same

Obsessed with performance:

Know and be accountable for your part to play, delivering it brilliantly

Align team goals and ruthlessly prioritise resources to deliver our Customer Commitments § Assign clear accountabilities, hold people accountable (in your team and out) and act on performance both good and bad

Lead beyond boundaries:

• Actively share and seek to understand the big picture, both internal and external § Story tell our Next Level Sainsbury’s strategy to drive end-to-end thinking
• Build productive partnership inside and outside our organisation

Lead Fearless teams:

• Create the environment for diverse perspective and challenge, where we are always looking to raise the bar
• Grow everyone around you (up, down and across) through adult-to-adult feedback and coaching § Know yourself (strengths, weaknesses and impact on others) and continuously develop Support we will provide
• Full system and process training for the role
• Wider Portfolio team for direction and guidance
• Access to personal development tools e.g. Bitesize talks, online self-development tools, internal mentoring etc

We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer, so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new - whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them:

Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to get 10% off at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat after 4 weeks. This increases to 15% off at Sainsbury’s every Friday and Saturday and 15% off at Argos every pay day. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform.

Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy additional holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, pay advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme, you will also be eligible for private healthcare too.

Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave.

Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).