LOCATION: LEEDS OR LONDON

The Bank of England (“the Bank”) is the UK’s central bank. The Bank is a diverse organisation, and each of its 5,000 people are committed to public service and dedicated to promoting the good of the people of the United Kingdom by maintaining monetary and financial stability.
The Bank spends approximately £300m annually on third party goods and services via contracts procured through the central procurement division. This expenditure is committed over a wide variety of categories that include ground-breaking technology and payments systems that service over £675bn of payments every single day, activities required to maintain a grade 1 listed building, and the specialist contracts required to print and distribute bank notes.

JOB DESCRIPTION

We are looking for an Optimisation Lead within the Procurement Division to support the management of the Division and the coordination of management processes as well as drive forward continuous improvement activities.
This role will report directly to the Chief Procurement Officer, attend the senior leadership team meetings and work together with other leaders within the procurement division.

RESPONSIBILITIES

The role’s responsibilities include to

• support the Chief Procurement Officer to continuously improve the Bank’s commercial division in terms of service offerings and capabilities,
• engage with senior stakeholders across the Bank to determine the change needs that the division needs to fulfil,
• assist in the promotion of the procurement division by supporting senior leadership team members in their efforts to secure funding to embed commercial teams within change and delivery programmes,
• take responsibility for identifying and, if appropriate, sourcing any required procurement resources and oversee their employment at the Bank,
• maintain job descriptions for staff within the procurement division and work together with talent acquisition and other parts of the people organisation to maintain adequate staffing levels through the recruitment of permanent and fixed term employees, and the engagement of temporary labour,
• act as the lead for the division’s engagement with the senior governance forums in the Bank, building a relationship with the secretaries and leading our liaison for other established bodies of users of procurement services in the Bank including the COO forum and staff networks,
• establish and maintain a community of practice for staff in the Bank engaged in commercial procurement activities including purchase order raisers, contract owners of low value contracts and others,
• support the management of the procurement division’s budget and training budget including supporting staff engaged in multi-year professional qualifications,
• work with the central communications team and become procurement’s key contact for internal communication initiatives,
• support all teams within the procurement division with their continuous improvement efforts, including the provision of any tooling that is required, and
• oversee the collection of performance data relating to the division’s performance against our metrics.

In addition to the role requirements outlined above, the holder of this role is expected to act and behave in line with the following behaviours:

• Customer focus
• Business acumen
• Evidence based decision-makin