UK Portfolio Office Lead

Job Type:

Build a brilliant future with Hiscox
 

About Hiscox UK

Hiscox UK is a leading brand in the insurance market, recognised as setting the standards others try to emulate. We consistently deliver strong growth and exceptional returns, recruiting only the very best and empowering them to deliver. We are known for insuring the homes of the rich and famous through to the most innovative technology companies. Our customers are diverse and unique and are only united by our ability to provide specialist insurance tailored to their needs.

The role

We are seeking a strategic and experienced Portfolio Office Lead to oversee the UK Change Portfolio Management Office for Hiscox. This role is critical in shaping the strategic direction, governance, and performance of a diverse portfolio of initiatives that span the UK business unit. The Portfolio Office Lead will ensure alignment with business objectives and investment priorities, while driving benefit realisation, risk management, and continuous improvement across the transformation landscape.
 

What you’ll be doing

Strategic Direction & Governance

• Lead the prioritisation and selection of portfolio initiatives ensuring they are aligned with organisational strategy and investment priorities, working closely with the Head of Transformation and Transformation Business Sponsor

• Provide strategic oversight of multiple concurrent programmes, ensuring alignment with portfolio objectives and organisational priorities

• Establish and maintain governance frameworks to ensure disciplined portfolio oversight

Stakeholder Engagement & Influence

• Build trusted relationships with senior stakeholders, initiative sponsors, and delivery teams across the UK business unit

• Act as a trusted advisor to executive leadership on portfolio performance, risks, and opportunities

• Facilitate cross-functional collaboration and strategic decision-making

Portfolio Performance & Delivery

• Oversee portfolio-level planning, performance tracking, and benefit realisation

• Monitor and manage portfolio risks, dependencies, and interrelated initiatives

• Ensure transparency and control through robust reporting and analytics

Resource & Capacity Planning

• Oversee portfolio resource planning across initiatives

• Lead capacity planning and allocation of project managers to priority initiatives

Continuous Improvement & Capability Development

• Drive continuous improvement in portfolio management practices, tools, and methodologies

• Build and embed delivery capability across the transformation office

Our must haves

• Proven experience in leading portfolio offices or enterprise PMOs within complex organisations, ideally within the insurance or financial services sector but not a necessity

• Successfully led and managed multiple large-scale programmes concurrently, ensuring strategic alignment and effective resource utilisation

• Strong strategic thinking and governance expertise

• Deep understanding of portfolio performance frameworks, risk management, and benefit tracking

• Experience with both Waterfall and Agile methodologies

• Proven experience and understanding of software delivery lifecycle

• Excellent communication, stakeholder engagement, and influencing skills.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, capable of working with people at all levels within and external to the business

• Experience managing multi-disciplinary teams and working in matrix environments.

• Have had exposure to distributed teams and relationship building with stakeholders 

• Proficiency in PMO tools such as MS Project (or other project tools), JIRA, Confluence, Power BI, PowerPoint and Excel.

• Be creative, proactive, logical and innovative and will not just accept the status quo   

• Be highly results driven, with the energy and determination to succeed in a very fast paced environment where the pace of response and leadership is critical to success

• Proficiency in MS Project, Excel, PowerPoint, Word and similar tools

Our nice to haves

• Experience of:

  • working in the insurance industry

  • system integration implementation

• Relevant certifications (e.g., PMP, PRINCE2, MSP, SAFe) are nice to haves

Diversity and flexible working at Hiscox

At Hiscox we care about our people. We hire the best people for the job and we’re committed to diversity and creating a truly inclusive culture, which we believe drives success.  We also know that working life doesn’t always have to in the office, and as long as it’s safe to do so, we will be operating a hybrid way of working to encourage a healthy work life balance, with 2 to 3 days in the office per week.

Work with amazing people and be part of a unique culture