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About the Role
The Assistant Director, Strategic Portfolio & Planning is accountable for ensuring the University has effective approaches to strategic prioritisation, planning, performance and risk. The successful candidate will provide strong institutional leadership on how choices about the funding of strategic initiatives are framed, prioritised & evidenced, enabling effective executive and governance decision‑making.
The role provides overall leadership of the team, holding accountability for collective performance, integration, coherence and outputs, while Senior Managers within the team retain ownership and remain accountable for the substance, analysis and professional judgement within their remits.
Key Responsibilities
- Strategic prioritisation and investment leadership: Lead the University’s strategic prioritisation and portfolio level investment processes, ensuring high quality options, explicit trade offs and decision ready recommendations for senior decision makers.
- Business planning and review: Lead the integrated business planning and review cycle, ensuring a clear line of sight between strategy, priorities, resources and outcomes, and improving value while reducing unnecessary process burden.
- Performance and risk frameworks: Lead the design, continuous improvement and effective use of performance and risk management frameworks so that insight actively informs executive oversight, prioritisation and institutional learning.
- Integration and assurance across the strategic portfolio and planning team: Set direction and standards, join up planning, investment, performance and risk, and provide quality assurance on high impact, cross team outputs, acting as an integrator rather than gatekeeper.
- Team leadership and ways of working: Provide overall leadership of the team in a way that strengthens Senior Manager ownership and confidence, while avoiding unnecessary management layers.
About You
Essential:
- Experience leading enterprise-level processes for the prioritisation of funding for strategic initiatives.
- Strong experience in strategic planning within a complex organisation.
- Proven ability to produce high-quality strategic analysis and materials for senior audiences.
- Excellent stakeholder engagement and credibility at senior levels.
- Strong coaching and people leadership capability, with experience developing team maturity and performance.
- Demonstrated ability to simplify processes and remove duplication.
- High integrity, resilience and comfort operating with ambiguity.
Desirable:
- Understanding of Higher Education or public sector strategy.
- Knowledge of performance and risk frameworks.
Support with your application
If you have any questions, or need support or adjustments relating to your application, the recruitment process, or the role, please contact us on 01908 541111 or email careers@open.ac.uk quoting the advert reference number.
What's in it for you?
At The Open University, we offer a range of benefits to recognise and reward great work, alongside policies and flexible working that contribute towards a great work life balance. Get all the details of what benefits we offer by visiting our Staff Benefits page (clicking this link will open a new window).
Flexible working
We are open to discussions about flexible working. Whether it’s a job share, part time, compressed hours or another working arrangement. Please reach out to us to discuss what works best for you.
It is anticipated that a hybrid working pattern can be adopted for this role, where the successful candidate can work from home and the office. However, as this role is contractually aligned to our Milton Keynes office it is expected that some attendance in the office will be required when necessary and in response to business needs. We’d expect this to be a minimum of once per week.
Next steps in the Recruitment process
We anticipate that first stage interviews for this role will be taking place online via Microsoft Teams during mid to late August 2026. Candidates who successfully progress past the first stage interview will be invited to a face-to-face second stage interview that will be taking place on-site at our Milton Keynes campus during early September 2026.
Early closing date notification
While most roles will remain open until the advertised closing date, applications may be reviewed on an ongoing basis. In some cases, vacancies may close earlier if a sufficient number of suitable applications have been received and equality impacts have been appropriately considered. All roles will remain advertised for a minimum of one week before any early closure is implemented.
If you have started an application or were in the process of applying when the advert closed, we encourage you to get in touch. We are committed to understanding individual circumstances and can offer further support where needed, including reasonable adjustments for applicants with protected characteristics.
How to apply
To apply for this role please submit the following documents:
- CV, including how you meet the skills and experience required.
- Complete the additional application questions within our online application form.
You can view your progress and application communications when you are logged into our recruitment system. Please check your spam/junk folders if you do not receive associated email updates.
