Engagement Lead/Programme Manager
Location: Hybrid 60% office-40% remote - Knutsford
Duration: 30/10/2026
Rate to -952

MUST BE PAYE THROUGH UMBRELLA

Role Description:
"Overview:
The Engagement Lead / Programme Manager is accountable for end?to?end delivery oversight across the programme, ensuring governance, strategic alignment, and effective stakeholder management. This role acts as the primary interface between delivery teams, senior stakeholders, and the client steering group. The individual owns programme performance, scope, budget, risks, and dependencies.
Key Responsibilities:

• Provide overall leadership for programme delivery, ensuring milestones, deliverables, and outcomes are met.
• Establish and maintain programme governance structures, including steering committees, RAID logs, delivery frameworks, reporting cadence, and escalation paths.
• Drive strategic alignment between business objectives, delivery plans, and technical workstreams.
• Own resource planning, financial tracking, budget management, and contract compliance.
• Facilitate client steering, executive updates, and strategic decision?making sessions.
• Oversee cross?functional teams, ensuring coordination between technical, operational, and business workstreams.
• Manage high?level risks, issues, dependencies, and assumption tracking (RAID).
• Ensure adherence to delivery methodologies (Waterfall, Agile, Hybrid) and organisational standards.
• Align programme outputs with change management, communications, and training requirements.
• Act as escalation point for critical delivery challenges, blockers, vendor issues, and scope variations.

Technical/Delivery Components:

• Understanding of enterprise delivery frameworks, SDLC, Agile at scale, and cloud transformation programmes.
• Ability to interpret solution architectures, integration requirements, and data dependencies at a high level.
• Experience with project management tools such as Azure DevOps, Jira, MS Project, and Confluence."