About the PRI

The PRI is the world’s leading proponent of responsible investment. It works to understand the investment implications of environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors and to support its international network of investor signatories in incorporating these factors into their investment and ownership decisions.

The PRI’s three distinct capabilities relate to the core elements of the PRI’s approach to achieving a sustainable financial system.

• Translate RI (Responsible Investment) thought leadership into insights and practical support that is tailored to what signatories need to progress their RI practice

• Convene our vast network to create opportunities for collaborative action

• Harness our global scale to influence policymakers and regulators to effect system change

Job Description

The Head of Portfolio and Applications will be responsible for providing leadership of the application strategy and roadmap, effective management and delivery of our internal applications estate and stakeholder support services across all business areas. You will be working closely with the Operations team and business representatives to ensure successful delivery for our signatories.The Head will ensure the overall management of our application suppliers and the associated contracts are designed to meet our delivery commitments.  You will report into and work closely with the Director of Technology and Infrastructure to embed the leadership of business partnering model within the team and the wider business, and ideally with experience working for a global organisation.

Core Responsibilities:

Team Management:

• Manage a team of business applications delivery team, primarily on critical portfolio that is signatory-facing and functional applications to provide high quality development and support to our business users and signatories. 

• Manage staff development and performance to achieve balanced business knowledge through business partnering and participation of knowledge sharing sessions.

• Contribute to the ongoing evolution of the technology and infrastructure operating model and its delivery, including team’s business plan and budget.

• Champion continuous process improvement culture, embedding best practices and ways of working across the organisation.

• Support the Director of Technology and Infrastructure in setting the vision, purpose, and culture of the Technology team.

• Provide regular reporting to the Director of Technology and Infrastructure and Chief of Operations Officer as required.

Business Applications Enterprise Architecture:

• Create and manage the business applications architecture within PRI, seeking out opportunities to innovate technologies, services and integrating the DevOps ways of working.   

• Working closely with CRM team to bring maturity and further development of our CRM Ecosystem, and in partnership with the CRM Governance and Champions Team.

• Collaborate cohesively with the IT Leadership team to implement the PRI technology strategy for business applications.

• Ensure the technology roadmap and foundational technologies are aligned to and anticipate the broader goals of Business Applications design, development, and delivery.

Business Partner:

• Lead on stakeholder engagement and communications to understand the specific goals of the overall business and individual departments, assessing business needs and adapting technologies to maximise the effectiveness of PRI and their individual departments and ensuring the business and signatories are actively involved in the lifecycle and journey of our applications and services.

• Provide steer on the demand prioritisation that enable well understood benefits, impact, and risk of the expected delivery, and manage the competing priorities accordingly.

• Foster strong relationships with our key development partners to ensure effective collaboration and their alignment to our software development processes and our business outcomes.

• Ensure timely and budget-conscious delivery of project outputs.

Business Process Alignment & Re-engineering: 

• Lead on the design, development of our signatory facing and business applications (e.g. Salesforce, Finance Sage X3, HR Sage People etc) through close collaboration with the Head of Digital Projects and business representatives on requirements gathering and the deployment plan.

• Lead on process improvement to present a streamlined with simplification approach that deliver operational efficiency.

Website Design and Development:

• Lead on the design, development of the PRI Website working closely with the Directors of Marketing and Signatory Support to ensure we have a website enabling our signatories and potential signatories with a better experience.

• Lead on the demand design with other key stakeholders to ensure their requirements are integrated and aligned to the website development and design principles.

• Manage the relevant integrations with our CRM solutions, ensuring data integrity and data policies are met.

Signatory and business support:

• Manage business application issues escalated from IT Helpdesk and the signatory support teams, and handling of Incident Management

• Ensure that appropriate support procedures and documentation are produced for the IT Helpdesk and where applicable that meet the needs of internal and external stakeholders.

Compliance and Security:

• Ensure that all business and signatory-facing applications, as well as the overall IT environment, adhere to regulatory requirements, industry standards, and best practices related to data security and privacy.

Person Specification

• Leadership Skills (including role-modelling positive behaviours, being genuine and vulnerable, driving change and making things happen) and the ability to think strategically and systemically and act for the long-term benefit of the organisation.

• Well-developed people management skills (including providing feedback & challenge, coaching, and developing individuals) and the experience to build and lead high performing hybrid teams.

• Broad experience leading critical applications development and service delivery

• Strong working experience of agile delivery, software development lifecycle and product delivery. You will have worked on and lead several projects that includes the ongoing development and new development of products and services. Certifications (e.g. scrum master) are desirable.

• Proven experience of managing 3rd party developers and experience on process improvement across the SDLC (requirements gathering, design, development, and test tools) is essential.

• Excellent communication skills, confidently present and influence senior management to facilitate effective decision making.

• Excellent networking, relationship management and interpersonal skills and experience of building strong and productive relationships at all levels

• Very good programme management skills, with experience in delivering complex projects successfully, including directing others that may not be your direct reports.

• ·Demonstrable Business Applications Management experience is essential; Salesforce, SageX3 and a general exposure to Microsoft applications and Azure a distinct advantage.

• Experience in developing and implementing business applications strategy in a global context which is aligned to the needs of the business, providing recommendations on how it will operate safely and securely in our existing technology estate.

• Experience with managing suppliers and 3rd party providers to ensure contractual commitments are met, including negotiating the scope of work, development, enhancement, upgrades.

• Experience in managing application solutions hosted both on traditional infrastructure and in the cloud is preferable and experience migrating products and services to the cloud is desirable.

• Experience at implementing and working in DevOps is an advantage.

• In-depth understanding of cloud-native architectures (ideally Azure), microservices, and API’s, is highly desirable.

• Demonstrates a commitment to developing others and a growth mindset, actively pursuing continuous profession and personal development.

• A collaborative and consultative approach to working with others, the ability to foster an inclusive working environment.

We particularly welcome candidates from under-represented groups, including Black, Asian, and other People of Colour, those with visible or non-visible disabilities, LGBTQ+ candidates and those who are neurodivergent.

The PRI is committed to offering flexibility to our employees, both formal (e.g. part-time work) and informal (e.g. a shift in hours to accommodate caring responsibilities). Please talk to us about how we could make this role flexible for you.

N.B. We reserve the right to close a vacancy before the closing date in the event of an overwhelming response or a change in business priorities.