Project Manager

Durham County Council; Spennymoor; Hybrid; GBP 55,000 - 85,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid working (home and office)

Generous annual leave 27 days rising 2

Local Government Pension Scheme

Job summary

Durham County Council is seeking a Programme/Delivery Manager to translate a large cloud migration portfolio into a concrete delivery plan. You will coordinate technical teams, service owners, and suppliers to sequence work, manage dependencies, risks and budgets, and present clear progress to senior colleagues.

You’ll lead testing, cutover, service readiness and a smooth transition to business as usual, while working with architects and specialists to create a feasible delivery environment.

Qualifications

• Experience in delivering complex digital or ICT projects.
• Ability to manage multiple priorities and dependencies across teams.
• Strong communication and influencing skills for senior colleagues.
• Experience with procurement or suppliers is advantageous.

Responsibilities

• Turn a mixed portfolio of systems into a deliverable plan with clear sequencing.
• Coordinate cross‑functional teams, suppliers, and service owners to align work.
• Manage dependencies, risks, issues, budget, and strategic decisions.
• Provide senior stakeholders with concise progress insights and actionable recommendations.
• Oversee testing, cutover, service readiness and transition to BAU.

Skills

Project management

Stakeholder management

Governance

Risk management

Financial management

Change management

Benefits realization

Education

Degree level education

Job description

Moving systems to the cloud is rarely just a technology problem. Contracts expire at different times, suppliers have their own roadmaps, services have competing priorities, technical dependencies surface late and decisions in one area can hold up several others.

WHAT IS INVOLVED?

Digital Services is delivering a significant programme to reduce the Council’s reliance on legacy infrastructure and move suitable systems to modern SaaS, PaaS and supplier-hosted services. The work spans third-party applications, internally developed systems and wider infrastructure dependencies, so you won’t be managing a single implementation with a neat start and finish.

Your job will be to turn that portfolio into a deliverable plan.

You’ll bring together technical teams, service owners, suppliers, Finance, Procurement, Information Governance and other colleagues to establish what needs to happen, in what order, by whom and by when. You’ll manage dependencies, risks, issues, budgets and decisions, and make sure problems are surfaced early enough for the right people to act on them.

Some migrations will be relatively straightforward. Others may involve procurement, contract changes, data migration, redesign, archive decisions or difficult choices about whether a system should be retained at all. You’ll help make those routes clear and keep work moving where responsibilities cross organisational boundaries.

You’ll provide senior colleagues with a clear view of progress and where intervention or decisions are needed. That means more than producing status reports. You’ll need to understand what is really happening across the programme, challenge weak plans or unclear ownership and turn technical and commercial detail into useful decisions.

You’ll also coordinate testing, cutover, service readiness and transition into business as usual, helping us make significant changes without losing sight of the services that depend on the technology.

You don’t need to be highly technical. Architects and technical specialists will own the technical designs and engineering decisions. We’re looking for someone who can work confidently with those specialists, understand the implications of their work and create the delivery environment in which it can succeed.

We encourage you to contact Benjamin Tulloch, Strategic Manager, Applications & Development, via email at [e-mail] to arrange an informal discussion about the role.

WHAT WILL I NEED?

You will need to be educated to degree level or equivalent in related discipline and have experience of managing multiple complex projects and delivering significant organisational or technology change.

You’ll be comfortable taking responsibility for work where there are competing priorities, incomplete information and dependencies between different teams and organisations. You should be able to establish structure quickly, work out where delivery is genuinely blocked and keep people focused on the decisions and actions that will move things forward.

You’ll need strong project management skills, including planning, governance, risk and issue management, financial management, change management and benefits realisation.

You’ll also need strong communication and influencing skills. You’ll be working with senior managers, service teams, technical specialists and external suppliers, and will sometimes need to reconcile different priorities or challenge assumptions while maintaining productive working relationships.

We’re looking for someone who can take complex information, understand what matters and present it clearly. You should be comfortable moving between detailed delivery discussions and concise reporting or recommendations for senior colleagues.

Experience of delivering complex digital or ICT projects, including working with suppliers and procurement, would be advantageous. Experience of cloud migration, hosting transformation or similar technology modernisation would also be useful, although specialist cloud knowledge is not required.

Please refer to the attached Person Specification for the full criteria.

INTERVIEWS

Interviews will be held on 17th November 2026.

We operate a guaranteed interview scheme for applicants that can show they meet all the essential criteria and have indicated they have a disability, are a looked after young person, care leaver or a veteran.

OUR OFFER TO YOU

We offer a competitive rewards package that includes attractive salaries, a generous annual leave entitlement of 27 days (rising to 32 after five years’ continuous local government service), membership of the excellent contributory career average Local Government Pension Scheme, and a range of flexible working arrangements including hybrid working (home and office) where applicable. Explore the full range of rewards and benefits on our website.

• attractive salaries
• generous annual leave entitlement of 27 days (rising to 32 after five years’ continuous local government service)
• membership of the excellent contributory career average Local Government Pension Scheme
• range of flexible working arrangements including hybrid working (home and office) where applicable

Rewards and benefits are subject to individual terms and conditions.

EQUALITY, DIVERSITY, AND INCLUSION

We are a proud equal opportunities employer and believe a diverse workforce brings fresh ideas and drives service improvement. We welcome applications from everyone and make employment decisions based on skills and ability. As a Disability Confident Leader, we actively encourage applications from disabled and neurodivergent people and offer support throughout the recruitment process.