Contracts Operations Manager

Wastewater

37 Hours / Permanent

Salary: Circa £60,000

Location: Hybrid working (Leat House, Washington with some home working and regional travel)

About the role

The award-winning Wastewater Networks team are responsible for the effective and efficient operation and maintenance of 30,000 km of sewers and associated assets. This work is completed by both contract partners and our in-house teams, all pulling in the same direction to provide outstanding service to our customers and protect our environment.

A position has now arisen to lead the operations of our contract partners and small in-house contracts team. This is a key operational leadership role and the successful candidate will be responsible for inspiring, developing and managing a large team of over 150 people that are all focussed on ensuring the effective operation of our wastewater network. The role has direct line of sight to many key Outcome Delivery Incentives (ODIs) including flooding, pollution, CMex and blockages all of which are definitely high profile.

To succeed, the successful candidate will ensure there is clear business direction to our contract partners and sufficient support is in place to deliver and drive continuous improvement.

There are also significant financial responsibilities with this role and the successful candidate will be responsible for the operational budget of £6.1 million and capital budget of approximately £20 million in 2023. There is therefore a large commercial part to the role where the successful candidate will have to work with others to ensure our spend represents good value for money and we are always considering how we can become increasingly efficient.

Project management and governance is another aspect to the role as the successful candidate will be responsible for delivering a number of performance improvement projects that have resources allocated to them with clear outputs expected, an example being the Flooding Other Causes project targeted at reducing sewer flooding.

Working with others is key and the successful candidate will need to work closely with other teams including Procurement and Finance to ensure solid contract arrangements are in place. Technical Support, Human Resources, Safety and other support functions must also be effectively engaged in order to drive continuous improvement across a range of objectives including pollution, flooding, safety, employee engagement and customer service.

Finally, the successful candidate will further develop our positive and open environment where we welcome and celebrate difference, promoting equality and diversity all of which will be underpinned by a positive Great Place to Work score.

About you

Within this role the successful candidate can directly impact performance of a number of company scorecard measures including internal flooding, external flooding, C-mex and employee engagement. We are therefore looking for someone who is well experienced in directly or indirectly inspiring, engaging and leading teams of operational people. The successful candidate must have an extensive track record of leading teams through change and significantly improving business results. This track record should be underpinned with an ability to understand detail, identify weaknesses and opportunities for improvement.

The successful candidate should also have experience of budget management and administration and be able to clearly demonstrate proactiveness and the taking of actions to reduce or accelerate spend in line with agreed budgets. This should also include confidence in working with others to identify and implement more efficient ways of working. Some form of contractual or commercial background would be useful given the scale of budget responsibility.

Excellent working relationships will be essential, we are therefore looking for someone who has extensive experience of working effectively with technical and non-technical colleagues in and out of the department as well as externally.

The successful candidate should be experienced in managing projects in addition to day-to-day operations and have the persistence and drive to overcome barriers and deliver business outcomes.

Finally, the successful candidate should be educated to degree level or be able to demonstrate the equivalent learning experience. It would also be useful if the successful candidate demonstrated a learning mindset with evidence of continuous professional development outside the day-to-day job.

Here at Northumbrian Water, Diversity, Inclusion and Equity means bringing your full self to work. We encourage and welcome applications from all underrepresented groups, as we believe and strive for community representation within all our teams, structures and organisation

NWG (Northumbrian Water Group) provides water and sewerage services to 2.7 million people in the North East of England as Northumbrian Water, and water services to 1.5 million people in the South East of England as Essex & Suffolk Water.

We are proud to serve our customers and we're committed to delivering great service, putting our customers at the heart of everything we do.