Job Description
Portfolio Manager
Location: National*
Closing Date: 26th June 2025
Interviews: w/c 14th July 2025
Grade: SEO
(MoJ candidates who are on a specialist grade, will be able to retain this grade on lateral transfer)
Salary: London: £47,657 - £52,040 (which may include an allowance of up to £418)
National: £41,463 - £45,276 (which may include an allowance of up to £462)
Working Pattern: Full-time/Part-time/Flexible working
Contract Type: Permanent
Vacancy number: 6822
*We offer a hybrid working model, allowing for a balance between remote work and time spent in your local office. Office locations can be found ON THIS MAP
The Role
We’re recruiting for a Portfolio Manager here at Justice Digital, to be part of our warm and collaborative Legal Aid Agency (LAA) and Probation teams.
This role aligns against Digital Portfolio Manager from the Government Digital and Data Framework.
A Portfolio Manager helps to co-ordinate and manage a portfolio of digital projects.
At this role level, you will:
Help to create environments that enable teams to deliver
Support the prioritisation of a group of projects and programmes
Help teams to follow governance and delivery processes
Help stakeholders understand the performance of work and any related risks
Support more senior portfolio managers and leadership in making improvements
To help picture your life at MoJ Justice Digital please take a look at our blog and our Digital and Technology strategy 2025
Key Responsibilities:
Support prioritisation of the portfolio required to deliver strategy:
Work with key stakeholders and support building a balanced portfolio of work that delivers strategy.
Manage the mechanics of the regular prioritisation process, helping decision making and application.
Help maintain the area’s roadmap, clearly demonstrating initiatives and outcomes they achieve, and being clear on pipeline.
Support teams in undertaking appropriate governance and delivering effectively to Justice Digital standards:
Support teams to apply good practice standards and approaches to underpin high-quality delivery and management of change.
Ensure that concerns and issues are appropriately escalated and dealt with.
Administer governance to help effective and efficient decision making & delivery.
Review processes to identify and implement improvements into the current ways of working.
Provide high quality visibility and insight to stakeholders on the performance and risk profile of work:
Help establish visibility and insight on performance, giving a relied upon view of whether delivery and outcomes are on track to management & central portfolio.
Build strong relationships with teams and stakeholders in order to obtain good up to date visibility and information on status and risk.
Support and administer portfolio views of risk, delivery roadmaps, dependencies and analysis.
Help recognise patterns and trends and draw key conclusions, outlining impacts, analysis and potential responses.
Constructively challenge delivery teams to help establish robust information on performance.
Support Portfolio Lead and Leadership teams to identify and take improvement action:
Input information, escalations and analysis to the Portfolio Lead and Leadership team to support giving them a reliable picture to act on.
Help provide supportive assurance; assist initiatives to proactively recognise and address challenges.
If this feels like an exciting challenge, something you are enthusiastic about, and want to join our team please read on and apply!
Benefits
37 hours per week and flexible working options including working from home, working part-time, job sharing, or working compressed hours.
A £1k per person learning budget is in place to support all our people, with access to best in class conferences and seminars, accreditation with professional bodies, fully funded vocational programmes and e-learning platforms
Staff have 10% time to dedicate to develop & grow
Generous civil service pension based on defined benefit scheme, with employer contributions of 28.97% from April 1st 2024 (Contribution Rates)
25 days leave (plus bank holidays) and 1 privilege day usually taken around the Kings’ birthday. 5 additional days of leave once you have reached 5 years of service.
Compassionate maternity, adoption, and shared parental leave policies, with up to 26 weeks leave at full pay, 13 weeks with partial pay, and 13 weeks further leave. And maternity support/paternity leave at full pay for 2 weeks, too!
Wellbeing support including access to the Calm app.
Bike loans up to £2500 and secure bike parking (subject to availability and location)
Season ticket loans, childcare vouchers and eye-care vouchers.
5 days volunteering paid leave.
Free membership to BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT.
Some offices may have a subsidised onsite Gym.
Person Specification
Essential
Has experience of managing portfolios of change, ideally in a digital or technology environment in both traditional and agile delivery styles.
Strong communicator with people at all levels. Communicates in a straightforward, honest and engaging manner with all stakeholders, creating positive relationships with some ability to influence.
Able to support teams in undertaking appropriate governance and delivering effectively to agreed standards.
Proficient at presenting information to reflect a true picture of performance and can contribute to thematic trend analysis that show root cause issues across the portfolio.
Able to plan, reassessing workloads and priorities if situations change or conflicting demands arise, solving and unblocking issues along the way.
Willingness to be assessed against the requirements for BPSS clearance
The Civil Service is committed to attract, retain and invest in talent wherever it is found. To learn more please see the Civil Service People Plan and the Civil Service D&I Strategy.
How to Apply
Candidates must submit CV and Cover Letter (500 words max), which describes how you meet the requirements set out in the Person Specification above.
In Justice Digital, we recruit using a combination of the Government Digital and Data Profession Capability and Success Profiles Frameworks. We will assess your Experience, Technical Skills and the following Behaviours during the assessment process:
Delivering at Pace
Communicating & Influencing
Managing a Quality Service
Seeing the Bigger Picture
Changing and Improving
A diverse panel will review your application against the Person Specification above.
Successful candidates who meet the required standard will then be invited to a 1-hour panel interview held via video conference.
Should we receive a high volume of applications, a pre-sift based on "Strong communicator with people at all levels. Communicates in a straightforward, honest and engaging manner with all stakeholders, creating positive relationships with some ability to influence” and “experience of managing portfolios of change, ideally in a digital or technology environment in both traditional and agile delivery styles” will be conducted before the sift. The panel will be conducting a sift on the following criteria from the Person Specification above:
Able to plan, reassessing workloads and priorities if situations change or conflicting demands arise, solving and unblocking issues along the way.
Able to support teams in undertaking appropriate governance and delivering effectively to agreed standards.
Proficient at presenting information to reflect a true picture of performance and can contribute to thematic trend analysis that show root cause issues across the portfolio.
Candidates who do not demonstrate examples/details of their experience of the requirements stated above in their Cover Letter will be rejected on this basis.
Should you be unsuccessful in the role that you have applied for but demonstrate the capability for a role at a lower level, we reserve the right to discuss this opportunity with you and offer you the position without needing a further application.
A reserve list may be held for up to 12 months, from which further appointments may be made.
Terms & Conditions
Please review our Terms & Conditions which set out how we recruit and provide further information related to the role and salary arrangements.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact digitalanddatarecruitment@justice.gov.uk
