IS Portfolio Manager

Position Overview

This IT Portfolio Manager position will report to the Head of IS Commercial, Strategy & PMO and will work within the Information Systems directorate based in our London office. The role is permanent.

You will be attracted a salary commensurate with your skills, qualifications and experience, with a 10% bonus. After the 6‑month probationary period, blended working can be arranged: 3 days in the office and 2 remote.

Close Date: 2705/2026

Benefits

• Reservist Leave – Additional 18 days full pay and 22 unpaid
• Personal Pension Plan – Personal contribution rates of 4% or 5% (UK Power Networks will make a corresponding contribution of 8% or 10%)
• Tenancy Loan Deposit Scheme, Season Ticket Loan
• Tax efficient benefits: Cycle to Work, Home & Tech, and Green Car Leasing Schemes
• Occupational Health support
• Switched On – scheme providing discount on hundreds of retailers’ products
• Discounted gym membership
• Employee Assistance Programme

Company Overview

UK Power Networks (UKPN) is a distribution network operator for electricity covering Southeast England, the East of England and London, serving 8.3 million domestic homes and businesses, and some 20 million customers.

Employing approximately 6,000 people, UKPN’s primary role is to ensure the infrastructure that brings power to homes, businesses, hospitals, schools, and other public services delivers reliable, safe and sustainable electricity to customers, irrespective of their chosen commercial supplier.

Its responsibilities include:

• Maintain the safety and reliability of the electricity networks;
• Connect new customers’ premises to electricity; and
• Extend and upgrade the electricity network to facilitate decarbonisation and customer needs.

Job Purpose and Role Summary

Information Systems (IS) meaningfully contributes in ensuring UK Power Networks remains the best performing UK network operator. The electricity industry is undergoing change with the need to develop smart networks that react to local and central generation sources and the demands of electric vehicles. The innovative exploitation of technology and data will be at the forefront of ensuring competitive advantage in this changing market, and IS needs continually to adapt to support effective technology‑enabled business change across customer, enterprise and smart power systems.

UKPN is now seeking an experienced IS Portfolio Manager to provide strong delivery leadership needed during this key period of change.

Main Goals and Responsibilities

• Oversee approximately £40m of annual CAPEX investment to ensure effective governance and control of expenditure, benefits achievement and output delivery, with a goal to deliver at least 94.5% CSAT for the projects we deliver.
• Responsible for the whole IS portfolio of change encompassing Core IS, Digital, Enterprise Data, OT, and Cyber.
• Ensure current disparate ways of working come under a consistent responsibility.
• All PMs and BAs will report into this role; support them to provide effective planning, prioritisation and delivery assistance to partners.
• Maintain consistency and efficiency across all delivery teams.
• Ensure processes, tools and reporting are appropriate, including reviewing existing approaches, implementing new ones and streamlining project delivery from start to finish.
• Provide tailored support to value streams and projects, depending on level and audience.
• Implement a reporting method to capture outputs from projects across the portfolio.
• Deliver clear, easy to understand and appropriately detailed communication of progress to various audiences, including tracking progress and inter‑dependencies between different parts of the roadmap and customer delivery projects.
• Use Monday.com to create appropriate and consistent progress reports for different audiences (Board, Exec Team, SMT, company‑wide).
• Manage effective internal communication of progress on roadmap and projects.
• Develop a culture of trust and respect around the full IS Portfolio.
• Develop good project governance, including identifying important milestones, collaborating with important partners to ensure projects run smoothly, creating a risk register, designing and tracking important metrics to assess effectiveness of planning, prioritisation and delivery.
• Help establish and maintain strategic partnerships with third‑party vendors and contractors.
• Chair performance meetings to address critical issues and delays, track development of the roadmap and customer projects, work with the PMO to ensure correct governance, track interdependencies, follow up on action points, flag resourcing issues and delays early for SMT meetings.

Qualifications

• Experience bringing different teams together to deliver consistently.
• Experience delivering business and technology projects resulting in business impact/value.
• Experience managing a portfolio of business and IT projects and programmes, using both traditional waterfall and agile methodologies.
• Experience of project management in a technical setting.
• Ability to identify gaps and independently implement solutions.
• Experience of different project management tools and solutions at all levels within the company.
• Experience managing partners with competing priorities.
• Experience building positive working relationships with cross‑functional teams, including engineers and scientists.
• Hands‑on preference, likes to get involved on the ground.
• Ability to lead teams out of uncertainty/change to focused/impactful outcomes.
• Analytical skills to define and develop solutions.
• Strong relationship building and trust with peers, vendors and customers.
• Results‑oriented, with energy and determination to succeed.
• Ability to work well under pressure.
• Adaptable to changing demands in a fast‑paced environment.
• Promote continuous improvement, learning and development, fostering an environment where people love to come to work.
• Self‑starter, able to formulate and develop the role across all aspects.
• Regulatory business experience preferred.
• Knowledge of SAP.
• Experience of Monday.com and standard project management Microsoft products.

Health & Safety Responsibilities

Managers and supervisors carry both legal and company responsibilities for ensuring the health and safety of their employees, those under their control and those who might be affected by the work undertaken, i.e., public, visitors and employees of other organisations. This includes briefing individuals working for them and ensuring there is the necessary understanding, competence and application of requirements to work safely and without harming the environment.

Employees will ensure they fully understand the health and safety risks involved in their work activities and their responsibility to apply the controls needed to manage those risks to acceptable levels. Similarly, where work activities can have an adverse impact on the environment, and particularly where there are legal requirements, employees will understand those impacts and the controls they must ensure are applied.

Employees need to be aware that for some craft and operational roles that work at height or use fall arrest devices, there is an upper weight limit of 116 kg due to maximum safe working load of the safety equipment that is used.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression, or veteran status. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.

Safeguarding Statement

We are committed to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people. Where applicable, this role is subject to safer recruitment processes and robust pre‑employment checks.

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