CONNECT Operations Manager
Vacancy Reference Number
19987
Number of Vacancies
2
(B) OCU
Digital, Data & Technology
Location
Bromley, Other
Building
Newlands Park
Band
Band C
Part/Full Time
Full Time
Hours per Week
36 hours per week
Type of Contract
Permanent
Job Advert
Job Title: CONNECT Operations Manager
Salary: The starting salary is £47,060, which includes allowances totalling £2,928.
The salary is broken down as £44,132 basic salary, which will increase annually until you reach the top of the scale £52,652. Plus, a location allowance of £1,928 and a non-pensionable allowance of £1,000.
Location: The primary Met Location for this role is Sydenham. Travel across the Met Estate, to attend meetings as required by the business, is expected.
"Keep checking Met Careers on a daily basis for new and exciting opportunities being released to join DDaT"
Policing London is a hugely complex challenge that evolves every day. To make sure the Met is up to the task, we need the right IT and systems across our organisation. As a CONNECT Operations Manager, you will help to enable us to do our best for the London area. Join us and play your part in making London the safest capital in the world and delivering 'More Trust, Less Crime and High Standards'.
As a member of the Met, you will also enjoy great benefits including annual leave, civil service pension arrangements, maternity/paternity support, as well as being part of a continuous learning culture.
Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT)
The mission of Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) is to provide the Met with information (and specifically data), communications and technology to help frontline officers and Met staff do their jobs more efficiently, in order to deliver the New Met for London plan. In other words, DDaT is about "passionately delivering trusted technology for precise data driven policing".
As well as keeping up to speed with developments in technology and making recommendations for new equipment and systems that will help modernise policing, DDaT also comprises the Data Office which:
* Owns and drives the data compliance and analytics agenda.
* Brings together the accountabilities that are currently dispersed across the Met business areas.
* Consolidates and further develops existing Met data and insight services.
* Enables data sharing and collaboration to serve the public and external partners.
DDaT is committed to creating an inclusive working environment. We support hybrid working, and the hiring manager will be happy to discuss arrangements for this role.
Job Purpose
Ensure effective implementation and adherence to the relevant project/product methodologies (e.g. stage gates, sprints etc.) and governance structure and mechanisms (risk management, dependency management etc.) across CONNECT
Strengthen the Senior Operation Manager's understanding of CONNECT's product health and navigation of the future roadmap, through proactive management and direct oversight of product delivery, and strong engagement and communication with stakeholders, providing timely data and information, pivoting away from management by exception and tolerance breaches to near real-time performance updates.
Provide valuable insights to the CONNECT Product Unit on backend product operations, supporting senior management's assessment of the risk between product enhancement and stability, within a volatile environment with consistently changing PESTLE (political, economic, sociocultural, technological, legal, and environmental) factors.
Key Role Responsibilities
* Create, maintain, monitor, track and manage risk, issue, dependency, assumption, change, and decision logs, ensuring early identification, transparent documentation, and effective management of potential challenges, enabling timely mitigation and maintaining programme integrity.
* Deliver timely operations administration services, including vetting application assistance, Aware account creation and laptop management, which is required to facilitate secure and efficient onboarding and operational support, thereby enabling newly appointed staff to become productive with minimal delay.
* Create and maintain project plans in MSP, monitoring the impact on the high-level milestones plan, which provides accurate visibility of progress against agreed milestones, allowing proactive management of dependencies and risks to delivery.
* Create and manage status reports, collating data from Workstream Leads for regular and ad hoc reports, which ensures stakeholders and leadership receive timely, accurate, and consolidated information to support informed decision making.
* Maintain the unit's finance plans, including scrutiny of actuals, reforecasting, accruals and comparisons against the plan to ensure financial governance, identify variances promptly, and alignment of financial performance with approved budgets.
* Ensure that version control and configuration management guidelines are adhered to, and documents are organised to enable ease of access for the Unit, maintaining document integrity, minimising errors, and ensuring consistent access to the most current collateral.
* Maintain Unit team and governance organisation charts.
* Maintain the Unit resource details liaising with the central resource team, ensuring there is accurate and up-to-date workforce planning data, enabling optimal utilisation of resources across CONNECT.
* Act as a point of liaison with the PDO providing information they request and ensure the Unit adhere to any standards that are set.
* Deputising for the Head of CONNECT Operations and the CONNECT Product Director as and when required.
* Arrange meetings and book meeting rooms upon request.
* Record minutes, notes and actions from key Unit meetings, as a collation of accurate and accessible record of decisions, discussions, and action items, will ensure accountability.
* Manage papers for governance boards and liaise with Workstream Leads to ensure governance forums are supplied with timely, comprehensive, and accurate documentation, enabling informed and effective decision making.
Additional Information
Vetting Clearance
This post requires access to the most sensitive intelligence material on a daily basis. Applicants must hold or be prepared to undergo National Security Vetting (NSV) Security Check (enhanced) (SC(e)) level before taking up the post; with a willingness to undergo Developed Vetting (DV) once in post, if required.
Hybrid Working
Hybrid Working available in line with the Metropolitan Police Service hybrid working policy.
Working Pattern
The role requires that you attend the Newlands Park office 3-days per week: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday between the core hours of 10:00 to 16:00.
How to apply
To begin your career at the Met, please click the "apply now" button below. The application process requires a comprehensive CV, a Personal Statement, and an online application form. In your Personal Statement, you should explain your interest in the position and illustrate how your skills and experiences make you a suitable candidate. Please note that you should not submit two copies of your CV, and ensure that your documents are saved in either PDF or Word format, clearly labelled as CV and/or Personal Statement.
Completed applications must be submitted by 23:55 on 30th October 2025.
Once received, your application will be reviewed against eligibility criteria, following this, your application will be reviewed by the hiring manager. The application review for this vacancy will commence early November.
Following application review, successful candidates will be invited to interview. Interview dates will commence mid-November.
Essential For The Role
Essential Criteria:
Knowledge
* Risk management practices and when to implement them.
* Dependency management processes, ranging from workstream to programme.
* Project management practices and approaches, e.g. Waterfall and Agile.
* Working knowledge of financial and budget management processes and procedures, i.e., how budgets, forecasts, actuals and accruals are actioned and how they interact with each other.
* Working knowledge of workforce planning and workforce management, i.e., understanding the difference between both and how sustained operational efficiency and productivity requires alignment to future capability and resourcing needs.
* Status reporting, ranging from workstream to senior management.
* Awareness of the cultural differences that are uniquely found in public sector, particularly policing services.
Skills
* Ability to apply risk management techniques to identify and mitigate workstream and project risks.
* Ability to apply dependency management techniques to identify and oversee workstream and project dependencies.
* Ability to apply effective workforce capacity techniques to drive optimisation of resource workload.
* Ability to deliver tailored communications, both written and oral, to a range of stakeholders.
* Highly organised and proven ability to prioritise to deliver to agreed deadlines.
* Ability to draft status reports for the Senior Operations Manager to review and refine before onward transmission to Senior Management.
* Ability to obtain workstream/project information to allow the Senior Operations Manager to develop targeted board packs.
* Proven ability to provide and deliver briefings and presentations.
* An interest in promoting positive improvement in the MPS and helping the organisation to adapt to new ways of working.
* Proficiency in Microsoft Office, including Microsoft Project.
* Ability to use initiative to unpick problems as processes and procedures cannot cover all eventualities.
* Evidence of inclusive behaviour.
Experience
* Financial processing including tracking timesheets, raising invoices and purchase orders.
* Experience of identifying new workstream and project risks, recording and updating these within a risk log.
* Experience of identifying and mapping new workstream and project dependencies, recording and updating these within a dependency log.
* Prepared meeting materials for senior stakeholder meeting, including targeted board packs and capturing accurate meeting minutes.
* Experiencing of reviewing resource schedules, identifying resource overutilisation and escalating this via the appropriate channels.
* Delivered lessons learned sessions to colleagues, as result of their experience in a similar role, and applied these best practices to business and/or operations management activities to ensure existing processes and procedures are optimised.
* Experience constructing cases which initiate change, understanding and projecting specific benefits to come from these changes.
Desirable Criteria:
* Higher education – degree or significant experience.
Required Languages
English
Reports To
Band B - Senior CONNECT Operations Manager
Candidate Information Pack
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Additional Information
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Disability Confident Statement
The Met is committed to being an equitable (fair and impartial) and inclusive employer for disabled people, striving to have a diverse and representative workforce at all levels. We encourage applications from people from the widest possible range of backgrounds, cultures and experiences. We particularly welcome applications from people with disabilities and long-term conditions, ethnic minority groups and women.
As a Disability Confident Leader, the Met has committed to making disability equality part of our everyday practice. We ensure that people with disabilities and those with long term conditions have the opportunities to fulfil their potential and realise their aspirations.
The Met is committed to making reasonable adjustments to the recruitment process to ensure disabled applicants can perform at their best. If you need any reasonable adjustments or changes to the application and recruitment process, we ask that you include this information within your application form. All matters will be treated in strict confidence.
Please note, if you are applying for a police officer role or to become a police community support officer (PCSO) or designated detention officer (DDO), there is a minimum requirement that you must pass a job-related fitness test (JRFT) at point of entry. This does not apply to police staff roles. Find out more about police fitness standards.
Read our full disability confidence statement.