Heritage Programme Manager and Business Improvement Lead

Starting salary: £52150

Contract type: Fixed Term

Grade: 5

Location: Longmore House (with hybrid working)

Working Hours: Monday - Friday, 35 hours per week

Interviews: To be held in person at Longmore House, Edinburgh on Wednesday 15 April 2026.

As the Heritage Programme Manager and Business Improvement Lead you will be responsible for planning, delivering, and governing programmes that support our strategic plan while driving continuous improvement across processes, systems, and ways of working. You will provide leadership, structure, and assurance to ensure benefits are realised, performance is optimised and a culture of effective project management and business improvement is embedded in our work.

You will lead a digital improvement project and lead on strategic business improvements across our functions. You will also focus on strengthening how the Directorate plans project management and delivery across the Directorate ensuring our work remains high quality, efficient, future ready, and aligned with organisational priorities.

• Enrolment onto a Civil Service Pension scheme 28% employer contribution
• 25 days annual leave, pro-rata (increasing to 30 days after 3 years) + 11.5 public holidays
• Reimbursement for relevant professional subscriptions
• Support for further education and personal development
• Study leave for work related courses
• Flexible working hours (where appropriate)
• Free entry to all of our properties (with up to three guests)
• Free entry to English Heritage, Manx and Cadw properties

As the successful candidate, you will work within the Heritage Policy and Engagement team to support the strategic delivery and continuous improvement of the Heritage Directorates operations by overseeing performance improvement, project governance, strategic planning, and business transformation initiatives. The role also provides leadership in aligning directorate objectives with corporate strategy and ensuring effective delivery of our services.

• Strategic Planning and Programme Management
• Lead the end-to-end delivery by colleagues of multi-disciplinary projects aligned to our priorities and lead the delivery of our digital improvements project with input from across our teams.
• Work closely with project managers across the Directorate to ensure that we have the right skills in the right places and embed project management skills and reporting cycles.
• Oversee our programmes and projects, ensuring effective programme plans, roadmaps, milestones, risk management, budget management, dependencies and governance structures are in place.
• Provide regular reporting to senior leadership, steering groups, and key stakeholders and develop and maintain systems for monitoring and reporting on our services.
• Work closely with project managers to monitor progress, ensure compliance with strategic objectives, and resolve delivery challenges.
• Use your expertise to deliver efficiencies and ways of working to increase capacity and outputs and ensure our projects deliver measurable benefits and positive outcomes.

• Lead the delivery of our programme of existing business improvement work by engaging and monitoring other teams to deliver their projects.
• Identify opportunities to streamline processes, reduce inefficiencies and improve service delivery.
• Lead lean/continuous improvement initiatives using recognised methods (Lean, Kaizen, Six Sigma).
• Analyse workflows and systems to recommend changes that enhance productivity.
• Support cultural change and promote a continuous improvement mindset across teams.
• Embed new processes and ensure improvements are measurable and sustained.
• Build and maintain trusted relationships across the Directorate to support programme delivery and change adoption by colleagues.

Communicate progress, risks, and decisions clearly.

• Work with our Heritage Business Manager and Heritage Business Planning and Development Officer to support development of our Directorates strategic plans.
• Contribute to the strategic use of data and insights to inform heritage…