Business Change Lead

Company:Mercer

Description:

We are seeking a talented individual to join our UK Transformation & Change team at Mercer. This role will be based in London or Manchester. This is a hybrid role that has a requirement of working at least three days a week in the office.

• Providing professional portfolio management and ensuring business readiness for transformational projects and programmes
• Leading business stakeholders through the change journey, supporting change leadership skills development and growing business change maturity
• Acting as a bridge between project initiatives and daily operations, ensuring new ways of working are adopted and benefits are realised
• Being responsible for the successful governance and delivery of projects as measured against project deliverables, timescale, commercial objectives and risk management
• Ensuring a standard approach to project governance, including high-calibre reporting on the progress of projects

We will count on you to:

Take responsibility for a transformational change portfolio including work and talent strategy, operating model redesign and business readiness for technology implementations (including AI)

Oversee the delivery of a transformational portfolio, including ensuring best practice standards are adhered to across all projects:

Stakeholders

• Build and manage relationships with senior and executive stakeholders, senior business partners, and third parties
• Becoming a trusted advisor and helping facilitate timely decision making and trade-offs throughout the change lifecycle
• Demonstrate the ability to translate ambiguity into tangible actions
• Navigate political complexity and competing priorities
• Work closely with various client-facing colleagues to manage change in line with client priorities
• Collaborate with and build relationships with IT teams or third-party suppliers
• Provide proactive support to non-project management specialists with responsibilities for managing projects within the business

Strategy

• Lead strategic alignment and prioritisation – collaborating with leaders to define, prioritise and align the portfolio to business strategy
• Engage key stakeholders to gain effective buy-in, ensuring adequate resources are made available for successful change.
• Serve as an expert in project delivery and change management, assisting business domains in defining the right approaches and ensuring solutions are fit for purpose

Execution

• Develop detailed, robust, high-quality programme delivery roadmaps for large scale, complex, strategic initiatives
• Align all outputs, outcomes and benefits to KPIs, validating that they are achievable by managing the interdependencies with other programmes and relevant business plans
• Proactively identify and resolve issues which threaten successful delivery
• Develop estimates and plans to create a baseline against which the project will be measured
• Demonstrate a clear understanding of business requirements for each project or workstream, making ongoing decisions based on what’s best for the organisation, challenging senior stakeholders on critical success factors
• Manage all commercial aspects of the project including effective change control of requirements, deadlines and effort
• Manage and optimise resources across the project or portfolio
• Resolve issues and initiating corrective action as appropriate
• Ensure there is an adequate understanding and management of the business risks inherent in any projects

Governance and control

• Establish and co-ordinate an effective Governance Board (or equivalent) to provide direction and support to resolve issues and ensure successful outcomes
• Monitor and report (progress, risks, budgets, issues) with sufficient clarity and timeliness to enable stakeholders to monitor progress in line with UK Transformation & Change standards
• Ensure adoption of systems and processes for planning, governance, reporting, communication, and budgets to ensure delivery to quality, time and cost requirements

What you need to have: 

• Significant experience of delivering or overseeing projects in Financial Services or Management Consultancy
• Ability to lead and motivate a cross-functional, distributed team to deliver successfully
• Strong experience of successfully driving business readiness projects with tight deadlines
• Exceptional interpersonal and communication skills - able to articulate complex messages with clarity and ease to all audiences and flex style as required and the ability to cope with high-demand requirements of senior stakeholders
• Experience navigating highly complex, political landscapes with multiple senior stakeholders
• Ability to act as leader or team member depending on situational context; responsible for delivering the programme outputs to tight deadlines, with a track record of delivering to time, quality and budget
• Experience in client-facing work
• Demonstrable resilience and ability to maintain motivation and drive to support colleagues through challenging times
• Collaborative team player who can influence outcomes as well as work independently. Known as being a team player and achieving for the group rather than individual
• Change Management qualifications
• MS Office products (Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Visio, Project)
• Experience of planning, monitoring and controlling projects, including risk and issue management
• Experience of financial control and budget management
• Operational management, process management and controls experience
• Strong influencing and negotiation skills

What makes you stand out?

• Operational leadership
• Operating model implementation experience

Why join our team:

• We help you be your best through professional development opportunities, interesting work and supportive leaders.
• We foster a vibrant and inclusive culture where you can work with talented colleagues to create new solutions and have impact for colleagues, clients and communities.
• Our scale enables us to provide a range of career opportunities, as well as benefits and rewards to enhance your well-being.

Mercer is a business of Marsh (NYSE: MRSH), a global leader in risk, reinsurance and capital, people and investments, and management consulting, advising clients in 130 countries. With annual revenue of over $27 billion and more than 95,000 colleagues, Marsh helps build the confidence to thrive through the power of perspective. For more information about Mercer, visit mercer.com, or follow us on LinkedIn and X.

Marsh is committed to embracing a diverse, inclusive and flexible work environment. We aim to attract and retain the best people and embrace diversity of age background, civil partnership status, disability, ethnic origin, family duties, gender orientation or expression, gender reassignment, marital status, nationality, parental status, personal or social status, political affiliation, race, religion and beliefs, sex/gender, sexual orientation or expression, skin color, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We are an equal opportunities employer. We are committed to providing reasonable adjustments in accordance with applicable law to any candidate with a disability to allow them to fully participate in the recruitment process. If you have a disability that may require reasonable adjustments, please contact us at [email protected].

Marsh is committed to hybrid work, which includes the flexibility of working remotely and the collaboration, connections and professional development benefits of working together in the office. All Marsh colleagues are expected to be in their local office or working onsite with clients at least three days per week. Office-based teams will identify at least one “anchor day” per week on which their full team will be together in person.