Digital Project Manager at Intellectual Property Office, Remote/Newport, 12 Months, £Contract Rate

The Intellectual Property Office (IPO) is the official UK government body responsible for intellectual property (IP) rights including patents, designs, trademarks and copyright. Our ambition is to be the best IP office, and we intend to achieve this by:

• Delivering excellent IP services
• Creating a world leading IP environment
• Making the IPO a brilliant place to work

We operate and maintain a clear and accessible intellectual property system in the UK, which encourages innovation and helps the economy and society to benefit from knowledge and ideas. We help people get the right type of protection for their creation or invention.

We have a small office in the heart of London, but our main office is on the outskirts of Newport, South Wales.

About us - Intellectual Property Office - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).

Key Tasks and Deliverables

• Lead a Transformation project through Discovery, Alpha and Beta phases, ensuring delivery aligns with the One IPO Delivery Framework, governance model and programme cadence.
• Develop and manage the integrated project plan, maintaining scope, milestones, deliverables, dependencies, assumptions, resources, critical path and delivery baselines.
• Define and agree project scope and objectives with Product, Delivery, Business Analysis, Service Design, User Research, Architecture, Data, Business Change, Security, Legal/Policy and operational stakeholders.
• Establish and maintain robust project controls, including project management information, governance artefacts, reporting, change control and decision logs.
• Lead RAID management, ensuring risks, issues, assumptions and dependencies are identified early, actively managed, and escalated through agreed governance routes where required.
• Coordinate delivery of project and programme artefacts, ensuring clear definitions of done, assurance requirements, evidence packs and approval/sign-off pathways.
• Provide high-quality reporting and delivery insight, including progress against plan, forecast confidence, dependencies, resource pressures, key decisions and emerging delivery concerns.
• Manage scope, schedule and priority changes, ensuring impacts are assessed, documented and controlled in line with programme governance.
• Drive cross-project alignment and dependency management, working with programme teams and workstreams to maintain delivery coherence across the wider transformation portfolio.
• Embed assurance and non-functional requirements into planning and delivery, including Secure by Design, data protection, benefits management, business change, technical governance and service readiness activities.
• Lead multidisciplinary teams and stakeholders, maintaining alignment to strategic outcomes, business case objectives and programme priorities.
• Plan and coordinate testing and assurance activities, ensuring effective engagement across test planning, execution, defect management and User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
• Manage resource demand and capability planning, working with resource owners to ensure the required skills and capacity are available when needed.
• Support phase transitions and delivery assurance, producing clear closure evidence, recommendations, lessons learned, outstanding actions and handover material.
• Lead Service Acceptance / Acceptance into Service activities, ensuring operational readiness, support models, service management requirements, transition plans, service acceptance criteria and business ownership are agreed and successfully achieved before live deployment.

Essential:

• Proven experience leading complex digital, business or technology transformation projects through Discovery, mobilisation and early delivery phases, operating effectively where scope, requirements and delivery approaches are still evolving.
• Strong project management and controls expertise, including planning, baselining, forecasting, RAID management, dependency management, change control, exception management and performance reporting within complex programme environments.
• Experience working within multidisciplinary teams, collaborating with Product, Delivery Management, Business Analysis, Service Design, User Research, Architecture, Engineering, Data, Security, Test, Business Change and operational stakeholders.
• Ability to establish effective governance, structure and delivery controls that provide stakeholder confidence while maintaining the flexibility required in agile and Discovery environments.
• Experience managing cross-team, cross-workstream and supplier dependencies, ensuring work is planned, sequenced, tracked and delivered transparently.
• Strong stakeholder management and communication skills, with the ability to influence, challenge constructively, facilitate decision-making and communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences, including senior leaders.
• Experience producing high-quality governance and portfolio reporting, including progress against plan, delivery confidence, risks, issues, dependencies, resource pressures, decisions and escalation requirements.
• Experience maintaining core project management artefacts, including business cases, PIDs, integrated plans, milestone trackers, RAID logs and governance documentation.
• Experience ensuring delivery remains aligned to business outcomes, including benefits realisation, business readiness, operational impacts and strategic objectives.
• Experience supporting assurance, quality reviews and phase-gate governance, using evidence-based decision-making to support progression through Discovery, Alpha, Beta and live service stages.
• Experience working on technology-enabled transformation programmes, with a strong understanding of software delivery lifecycles and the ability to work effectively alongside agile delivery teams.
• Practical experience using project and delivery tooling, such as Azure DevOps, MS Project, Planner or equivalent, to support planning, dependency management, tracking and reporting.
• Experience planning and supporting testing activities, including test planning, defect management, User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and readiness assessments.
• Experience leading Service Acceptance / Acceptance into Service activities, including operational readiness, service transition, support model development, service acceptance criteria, service management processes and deployment readiness.
• Highly organised with the ability to manage competing priorities and multiple delivery demands in fast-paced and complex environments.

Please be aware that this role can only be worked within the UK and not Overseas.

Disability Confident 

As a member of the Disability Confident Scheme, IPO guarantees to interview all candidates who have a disability and who meet all the essential criteria for the vacancy. In cases where we have a high volume of candidates who have a disability who meet all the essential criteria, we will interview the best candidates from within that group. In exceptional circumstances, we may also need to apply the desirable criteria in our shortlisting process which may include holding active security clearance.

In applying for this role, you acknowledge the following this role falls in scope of the Off Payroll Working in the Public Sector legislation. Any rates of payment quoted will reflect the gross rate per day for the assignment and will be subject to appropriate taxes and statutory costs. As such the payment to the intermediary and your income resulting from this contract will be different.