Enterprise Portfolio Management Lead at National Highways, Nationwide, 6 Months, c£750 per day

Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM) Lead

Initial Contract Length: 6-months

Day Rate: Circa £750pd (Inside IR35)

Location: Nationwide

About the job.

National Highways have an exciting 6-month contract opportunity for an Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM) Lead. You will be responsible for ensuring projects are aligned to the Information Technology Directorate strategy through having a view of high-level governance and demand planning. The EPM lead will breakdown any silos currently existing by having input from both the strategy function and the performance function and being able to feed information up or down accordingly. The EPM Lead will have responsibility for building the IT Backlog by prioritising requests from the customer journey and align them with current priorities and strategy.

This role can be based Nationwide, but travel into your nearest National Highways office, will be required. There will also be the need to travel to a central location for quarterly business meetings.

Key Accountabilities

• Leads the Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM), including portfolio resources and demand management across business-as-usual activities, programmes and projects.
• Ensures that the EPM acts as a forward-looking function by anticipating demands and optimising the use of resources to meet strategy.
• Ensure programmes are properly financed, resourced and interventions are made where necessary when benefits stated in the business case cannot be met.
• Ensure that projects are aligned to the ITD strategy and drive the targeted 80/20 planned/reactive demand pipeline.
• Keeps abreast of industry best practice and cascades ways of working in order to make portfolio operations efficient.
• Works closely with leaders of operational delivery teams across the directorate.
• Understands organisational strategy and objectives and can align activities at a cross-functional level.
• Drives policy and strategy for service and capacity management, and the implementation of required changes.
• Identify opportunities for cross-organisational technology change initiatives, devise strategies and provide leadership for the implementation of those change initiatives.
• Provides the direction for teams in using the most appropriate tools and methodologies and introduces new tools where investment can be justified.

About you.

Business Knowledge and Experience

• Degree qualified (Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) or equivalent experience, including recognised project or programme management accreditation.
• Extensive experience operating within structured IT programme and project management environments, including major, high‑risk or complex initiatives.
• Strong understanding of current digital technologies used to build, operate and deliver digital services.
• Expert business acumen, able to interpret technical plans and delivery activities to support effective, informed decision‑making.

Functional / Technical Skills

• Expert in portfolio and lifecycle management, ensuring robust governance, change control and risk management across all phases.
• Proven ability to prioritise and plan resources based on strategic intent and return on investment (ROI).
• Strong stakeholder leadership skills, able to manage expectations, facilitate complex discussions and represent the community to senior internal and external audiences.
• Experienced in product and service delivery, applying lean and six sigma principles, integrating products with wider services, and developing sustainable support models.

About us.

Here at National Highways, we manage and improve England’s motorways and major A roads, helping our customers have safer, smoother and more reliable journeys. Our priorities are safety, customers and delivery, and at the core of this, are our values of passion, integrity, safety, teamwork and ownership.

Operations is at the heart of keeping the strategic road network moving and ensuring our customers get the best possible experience when using our roads.

We address over 39,000 customer enquiries every month, plan and deliver all maintenance activities on the network, drive efficiencies and improvements across our systems and roads, and respond to incidents across 4,500 miles of motorways and major A-roads that we manage. All to make sure National Highways customers have safer, smoother, and more reliable journeys.

External candidates will be offered a starting salary at the lower end of the pay scale, while current employees will be appointed in accordance with our established pay policy.

We are committed to creating a diverse environment and welcome applicants from all backgrounds.