Job Description
We are News UK Technology: using technology to innovate and lead the global conversation on the future of media and storytelling. We keep people at the heart of our business through value-driven and inclusive practices enabling our staff to grow and thrive. As such, we are proud members of Tech Talent Charter UK with 34% of our Tech roles filled by gender minorities. News UK Tech is an award-winning team, winning Team of the Year at the UK Business and Innovation Awards 2023.
Content Platforms is a technology team within News UK Tech that provides content planning, management, authoring, curation and distribution capabilities that allow the flexibility for reuse across News UK brands, enabling our content creators to deliver the most trusted and compelling journalism in the world. Our platform underpins some of the biggest publishing brands in the UK, including The Times and The Sunday Times, and the UK’s most widely read publication, The Sun. Content Platforms are poised to change the way our newsrooms create, develop and interact with content, helping to solve the major challenges of transforming to a digital first organisation while inspiring and empowering our newsrooms to expand their horizons and push the boundaries of how stories will be told in the future. We are an agile, cross-functional and diverse team of just over 50 strong, located in London, Sofia and Bangalore.
The Team: Content Platforms Times Team - A cross-functional team comprising software engineering, product management, business analysis, and UX&D. This team builds and manages the editorial tools used by The Times and Sunday Times newsrooms to produce and curate world-class content every day. This includes ongoing projects to deliver a new, digital-first CMS for our journalists and developing tooling to improve planning and workflow management.
Your Role: We are looking for a Senior Agile Project Manager to join the Content Platforms Times Team. You'll show passion for technical challenges and take risks with bold ideas. You'll help build self-organised, highly motivated teams to unravel complex problems and take innovative approaches.
Day to day you will:
1. Oversee the software development life cycle, tailoring agile ways of working, developing a culture of continuous delivery, and collaboratively shaping the delivery practices of your teams.
2. Raise and resolve risks, dependencies, and issues, and negotiate trade-offs and dependencies with other teams.
3. Report on delivery progress and ensure timely communications and updates with stakeholders (familiarity with scaled Agile frameworks or portfolio reporting).
4. Line manage an Associate Project Manager.
5. Work closely with other Discipline leads to build and maintain effective delivery culture within your teams and deliver on business goals and priorities.
6. Lead and facilitate workshops both within Content Platforms and externally between technology teams and our business stakeholders.
7. Coach and mentor on agile practices across the various disciplines within your team.
8. Help manage resourcing plans in conjunction with the budget, ensuring teams are set up for success with the right roles to deliver planned initiatives.
9. Be a part of and contribute to the Project and Programme Management (PPM) community within News UK (40+ PPMs).
What we’re looking for from you:
10. Delivering Value:
Lead end-to-end delivery across multiple teams by prioritising around business value and validating benefits with customers.
Exemplary management of stakeholders through proactive communication and exception handling.
11. Leading with Agility:
Apply Agile approaches to build collaborative, cross-functional teams delivering value to the business.
Use Agile approaches to review skills and capacity for delivering against priorities each quarter, and reorganise teams as appropriate to set them up for success.
12. Planning Effectively:
Use Agile techniques to transform complex, high-level business proposals into a roadmap with a clear, accurately estimated release plan.
Manage your teams’ dependencies through influence, collaboration, and organisation.
You have:
13. Strong experience in Agile project management and leading cross-functional teams.
14. Proven ability to manage stakeholders and communicate effectively.
15. Technical skills in Agile methodologies, software development life cycle, and team resource planning.
We are News UK : One of the leading media businesses in the UK and Ireland. Our newsbrands include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun, The Sun on Sunday and The TLS. Our national broadcast brands include talkSPORT, Times Radio, TalkTV and Virgin Radio UK, and we have market-leading local radio stations across Ireland. Our world-famous brands provide news, analysis, opinion and entertainment to almost 40 million people each month. Spanning print and pixel, audio and video, events and experiences, our multiplatform brands are home to a plurality of opinion, representing the diverse communities we serve. News UK is wholly owned by News Corp.
Life at News: Driven by passion, guided by principles and acting with purpose. We represent, reflect and reach the nation, telling the stories that matter. We inform our audiences so that they can make decisions based on trusted information.
To do this, we believe our employees must represent different backgrounds, perspectives and experiences. We strive to maximise and encourage every individual’s potential and ensure everyone feels valued. We support this through our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Strategy, which focuses on three main priorities - attracting talent from a wider, more representative pool, developing equity programmes to drive better representation in our leadership, and ensuring diversity and inclusivity in our workforce as well as the journalism and content we produce. We also currently have 12 employee led networks and groups that support our strategy and connect like minded employees socially.
Benefits:
Some of our benefits include:
16. Maternity leave up to 18 weeks full basic salary & paternity leave up to 2 weeks
17. Wide range of training available, plus full LinkedIn Learning access
18. Private medical insurance including coverage for pre-existing conditions
19. Discounted gym memberships, free ClassPass at Home, weekly virtual yoga classes
20. ‘Bikes for Work ’ and ‘Electric Car’ scheme
21. Up to 60% discount on Harper Collins books
22. Access to exclusive events and competitions with exciting brands such as talkSPORT, Virgin Radio UK & The Times. Weekly virtual panel chats with top journalists and celebrities
23. Access to wellbeing benefits such as EAP, physio/massage and counselling
24. A generous pension scheme with employer contributions of up to 5%
25. 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays and up to 4 volunteering days per year
26. Thriving employee networks supporting colleagues to embed and grow, including women in technology, parenting, wellbeing, GenZ, NewsIsOut and faith-oriented groups.
We want to ensure that everyone we meet has the opportunity to perform to their best when applying for a role. Please let us know, at any stage, whether you require any reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process, and we will do our best to accommodate.
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