Business Change Manager at Ministry of Defence, London, to the end of March 2027, £Contract Rate

The Ministry of Defence (MOD) is a central government department with a mission to protect our country and provide the ultimate guarantee of its security and independence, as well as helping to protect its values and interests abroad.

This role sits within DefHRS, the People Function 's flagship HR transformation programme, and plays a key role in delivering people-centred change across Defence. The Business Change Specialist will drive change adoption and business readiness activities, ensuring that military and civilian communities are prepared for and supported through the transition to new HR services, processes and technologies. Through effective stakeholder engagement, impact assessment, readiness planning and change interventions, the post holder will help maximise adoption, minimise disruption and support the successful realisation of programme benefits.

We are seeking a Business Change professional to support leading DefHRS change activity and build change capability across the Defence enterprise. The successful candidate will help shape and deliver the DefHRS change strategy and plan, ensuring a coherent and smooth transition to new HR services, processes, data and systems. The role requires the ability to lead complex change in a large and ambiguous stakeholder environment, with strong leadership, collaboration and communication skills. The role sits within the DefHRS Business Change, Training, Communications and Engagement team and is responsible for setting change standards, driving adoption, monitoring readiness and escalating change risks and issues to enable effective decision making. The role will report to the DefHRS Head of Business Change, Training, Communications and Engagement.

SC Clearance is an essential requirement for this role, as a minimum you must be eligible and willing to undergo these checks. Please note, due to the exceptional requirements of this position (short-term nature of this role and speed at which we require a postholder in situ) preference may be given to candidates who meet all of the essential criteria and hold active security clearance.

As a Business Change Manager, your main responsibilities will be:

• Change Management and Adoption - Lead the successful adoption of DefHRS change by embedding change management into programme delivery plans, building change capability and ensuring new HR ways of working are sustained.
• Change Readiness, Impact and Insight - Lead activity to understand business impacts, assess readiness and use insight to inform targeted interventions across Defence user groups.
• Change Governance, Risks and Assurance - Support effective oversight of change risks, issues, dependencies and assurance, enabling informed decision making and successful delivery outcomes for DefHRS.
• Providing visible and effective leadership;
• Acting as an escalation point for Business Change issues, unblocking and helping to overcome barriers
• Building capability by coaching and motivating the DefHRS change team to achieve high performance
• Fostering strong and effective relationships with senior stakeholders across the programme and business areas
• Influencing key stakeholders to buy-in and advocate the change actively across their business areas
• Identifying and assessing the scope and scale of change to determine the best approach and resource requirements
• Understanding the effect and impact of the change on the business (and customer, if appropriate), ensuring effective mitigations are in place
• Assessing business readiness and confidence to adopt new HR services, processes and systems with key stakeholders.
• Providing regular reporting on progress, ensuring early warning is given to potential risks to business readiness
• Ensuring adoption and implementation of new HR capabilities by the business.
• Provide line management (where required)

Essential Skills

• Deep expertise of implementing successful change management in a large, complex, high-profile and ambiguous, large-scale programme or projects
• Extensive experience across both IT and people change delivery
• Experience of working across multi disciplinary teams
• Working across product design teams
• Ability to build effective relationships with a wide range of senior stakeholders and facilitate collaborative ways of working
• Lead and oversee the quality and consistency of project team's change activities
• Proven track record of building change management capability
• Experienced line manager

Desirable Skills

• Experience of implementing successful enterprise-wide change management
• Experience of HR functional transformation, shared services and/or Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) enabled change.
• Experience of managing the day-to-day activities of external suppliers
• The following qualifications would be desirable for this role: Managing Successful Programmes Practitioner; APM Project Management Qualification; APM Chartered Project Professional

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, the MOD 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.

This scheme encourages candidates with a disability and/or neurodivergence to apply. In exceptional circumstances, we may also need to apply the desirable criteria in our shortlisting process which may include holding active security clearance.

Armed Forces Covenant

The MOD guarantees to interview veterans or spouses / partners of military personnel who meet all the essential criteria for the vacancy. In cases where we have a high volume of ex-military candidates / military spouses or partners, who meet all of 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.