Head of Delivery (Infected Blood Compensation Authority) - CO - SCS1

Location

Newcastle-Upon-Tyne
Based in Benton Park View, moving to Newcastle City Centre in Summer 2026.
This is a hybrid role with the expectation of 60% office attendance.

About the job

Job summary

Digital Directorate

The Digital Directorate leads on service ownership, service design and the development of technical services for the Infected Blood Compensation Authority. The team is accountable for designing, developing and maintaining an effective service for the payment of compensation to enable IBCA to achieve our mission.

Our work encompasses all elements of design from processes and guidance to the technical architecture which underpins the digital elements of our service and the infrastructure for the authority to work from. 

We work across all areas of IBCA and directly with users to design a service which has users at the heart, is legislatively compliant and technically robust.

Job Description

Reporting to the Director of Digital, the Head of Delivery is pivotal in the successful delivery of IBCA’s strategy and service development and ensuring effective IT support to the organisation. 

The role will be responsible for ensuring the effective delivery of the Infected Blood Compensation Scheme to agreed design and technical standards working alongside the Head of Product and Chief Technical Officer. The Head of Delivery will be leading multiple teams with product, design and technical expertise working alongside operational and data specialists to deliver this incredibly important service in a user centred way, at pace. 

The Head of Delivery will engage with all areas across the organisation and beyond to collaboratively agree and communicate our service level plan. They will ensure that the correct structures and ways of working are in place across the digital teams to have comprehensive and aligned planning across teams which meets the roadmap, is developed collaboratively and in line with Government Service Standards, is effectively broken down to provide delivery confidence and is trackable to enable teams and leadership to follow progress ensuring quality and pace.

They will also ensure we have a clear IT strategy in place at an organisational level and work closely with CO Digital to leverage this support in a mutually beneficial way. 

Job description

Key Responsibilities

Agile Programme Management: Ensuring clear models and structures and tools in place to enable multi-team working against a single service plan and backlog. Providing direction of approach, consistent tooling, coaching and consistent formats to support effective planning, breakdown of work, reporting and ensuring the embedding of agile practices such as retrospectives and sprint planning. 

Commercial and Financial management supporting value for money and managing multiple supplier relationships.

Keeping a Focus on Outcome Delivery: Working with Head of Product and Chief Technical Officer to jointly assure digital development plans to ensure these are aligned to the roadmap, achievable and clearly communicated. Ensuring that all elements of service delivery, including operational readiness and supporting guidance, are included and tracking progress to manage risks to delivery.

Digital Leadership: Direct leading of the delivery roles in the Digital and IT teams. Ensuring all digital teams work in alignment to the single service roadmap and balancing quality and pace of delivery and that the work is visible and well reported to enable effective risk and dependency management and provide clear views against progress.

Stakeholder Engagement: Working in close collaboration with teams across IBCA and wider stakeholders  to ensure clarity of plans and buy-in to digital delivery and IT strategies.

Embedding Agile Approaches: Supporting the development of an agile and service orientated mindset across the whole organisation. Ensuring visual and open working standards and advocating for test and learn approaches. Embedding and ensuring adherence to government service standards across digital teams.

IT Strategy and Provision: Ensuring effective provision of IT infrastructure, hardware and software through a coherent strategy. Liaising with IBCA teams to understand and forecast requirements and managing commercial arrangements and working with CO Digital partners to put these in place to agreed levels.

Person specification

You will have the following skills, knowledge, and experience:

An exceptional and authentic leader, with the ability to build, inspire and engage their teams to deliver results even in times of ambiguity

Experience of leading digital teams, ensuring effective ways of working across multiple teams including managing plans, risks and dependencies in a responsive and transparent way

Experience of operating and iterating large-scale digital services working with specialists across all digital roles and ensuring that technical standards are in place

Strong evidence of building excellent stakeholder relationships, creating a wide ranging network across organisational boundaries that supports collaborative working across teams and enables issues to be surfaced early for effective resolution. 

Strong financial acumen and experience of effectively developing and maintaining supplier relationships to support achievement of key objectives