Business Initiatives Lead

Key Duties and Responsibilities

Initiative Governance

• Maintain the improvement and initiative portfolio registers; ensure records are current, complete, and accurately reflect the status of all active work.

• Run intake and governance gates: confirm that each initiative has a defined sponsor, owner, milestones, benefits case, risks, and dependencies before it is approved to proceed.

• Monitor initiative status across the portfolio; identify at-risk items early and escalate to the Head of Business Excellence with a clear assessment.

• Work with the CI Lead to ensure RCA-derived initiatives are captured in the register and tracked to verified close-out.

Benefits Tracking and Close-out

• Verify that benefits are being realised against the commitments made at approval; engage the CFO and relevant function heads where financial validation is required.

• Ensure that lessons learned and close-out evidence are documented before initiatives are marked complete.

• Produce portfolio health reports for the Head of Business Excellence and ExCo, covering status, benefits realisation, overdue actions, and risks.

Project Management

• Support each Initiative Lead with Project Management expertise

• Ensure all initiatives have fully developed project plans that are reported out.

• Support Initiative Leads with tools to assist with tracking progress

• Support Initiative Leads with cross functional facilitation to unlock constraints.

• Keep overall tracking of progress on all the Initiatives.

Performance and Reporting

• Prepare regular portfolio health packs for the Head of Business Excellence and ExCo, covering the initiative pipeline, benefits status, and items requiring escalation.

• Contribute improvement portfolio data to the Business Excellence monthly performance pack.

• Track overall Initiative load on the organisation and resolve/clarify conflicts on resources to manage the Initiatives successfully.

Key Requirements

Education and Work Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Business, Finance, or a related discipline.

• At least 7 years in programme or portfolio management, business improvement, or operational excellence, with experience in refining, petrochemicals, or a comparable heavy industrial environment.

• Demonstrated experience managing improvement portfolios across multiple functions, including benefits tracking and governance.

• Comfortable working with financial data; able to validate and interrogate benefit cases with confidence.

• Experience with external benchmarking programmes, including Solomon or equivalent, is an advantage.

Functional Competencies Must-have:

• Able to design and run portfolio governance processes that are practical and consistently applied across the business.

• Maintains register accuracy and completeness as a non-negotiable standard; recognises that a portfolio which is not current is not a reliable basis for decisions.

• Produces clear written outputs; portfolio packs and escalation notes are well-structured and self-explanatory.

• Able to work with the CFO and function heads on financial benefit validation; financially confident without overstepping into financial management.

Soft skills:

• Achieves results through initiative sponsors and owners who do not report to this role.

• Holds initiative owners to agreed milestones in a professional manner; focused on outcomes.

• Exercises sound judgement when navigating priority and sequencing decisions across competing functions and agendas.

• Excellence in facilitation and problem-solving skills to assist with unlocking constrained initiatives.