Head, Transformation Project

Role Overview

This is a senior delivery role for someone who can take a large, globally distributed transformation from ambition through to embedded practice. The Project Lead owns the journey end to end — shaping the future operating model, standing up the governance that keeps senior decision-makers genuinely engaged, and driving day-to-day delivery of changes that touch people, processes, data and technology across the organisation. The work matters because the outcomes shape how the organisation's programmes and partners operate worldwide, so delivery has to be robust, inclusive and built to last well beyond the project's close.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the project team through both direct and indirect management, and remain answerable to the CTO and TSG for delivery outcomes.
• Design and operate the project's governance architecture: reference groups that draw subject matter expertise into design and delivery, design authorities that ratify design decisions, and a Management Review Group acting as the ultimate decision-making body.
• Build and sustain engagement with senior leaders across the wider organisation and partner with functional leads from multiple areas, keeping that engagement purposeful rather than ceremonial.
• Produce plans and reporting that align with the organisation's standard project and change methodologies and meet portfolio-level requirements.
• Own the project budget — define it, monitor it continuously, keep spend compliant with required processes, and escalate and resolve issues promptly.
• Define the future operating model in detail: the actions needed to reach it and the consequences for programme participants, partners and staff, as well as for processes, data and technology. Where AI or other technology can support delivery, ensure it is evaluated and embedded in a way that is sustainable, scalable and suited to programme needs.
• Map and actively manage dependencies with other initiatives and functions, making sure each one has a named owner and clear accountability.
• Take a hands-on role when problems arise — identify issues, drive them to resolution, and report subsequent impacts to governance in a timely way.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Considerable experience leading, managing and deploying large global transformation projects — covering both system and non-system change — within Save the Children or an organisation of equivalent scale.
• Direct accountability for resolving issues, combined with a track record of building others' capacity so they can solve problems themselves.
• Experience setting up large-scale global transformation initiatives from the ground up, including recruiting key roles, establishing governance and aligning functions.
• Familiarity with agile and waterfall project standards plus change management practice, evidenced by formal training, and the ability to hold project teams to those standards.
• Demonstrated experience engaging senior leaders up to Board level and partnering with leaders across multiple functions.
• Ability to resolve complex project issues using a balance of pragmatism and rigour, including leading others to deliver required interventions and managing the associated governance.
• Extensive line management experience, including teams with multi-layered hierarchies, with coaching skills that develop others in project management, change management, project feasibility and initiation.
• Proven ability to operate successfully in a matrix structure — overseeing resources without direct line management — and to work across several different functional areas.
• Operational expertise with digital technologies in a transformation context, including familiarity with applying Artificial Intelligence to support programme delivery and/or designing and implementing technology solutions that strengthen organisational and programme delivery capability.
• Educated to degree level or equivalent work experience.
• External project and/or change management accreditation.

Desirable

• Knowledge or experience of the non-profit sector.
• Proficiency in a second core Save the Children language — French, Spanish, Portuguese or Arabic.