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The Rural Payments Agency (RPA) is an executive agency of the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), delivering over £2 billion in payments to farmers, traders and landowners each year.

We are an Operational Delivery Profession organisation, with the majority of our people delivering day to day services to our customers and stakeholders.

We make excellent delivery happen, empowering agricultural and rural communities to create a better place to live.
We manage over 40 schemes, and also make payments on behalf of Natural England, to ensure we have a healthy rural economy, strong and sustainable rural communities, and to protect and enhance the natural environment.

Our vision is to create a great place for people living in this country. We have developed a set of four strategic objectives covering our policy outcomes and corporate objectives. These objectives help us to deliver our ambitious vision to build our green and healthy future and provide a framework for all of the important work that we carry out.

Further information can be found on the Rural Payments Agency website www.rpa.gov.uk.

The Service Development Manager (SDM) role is an opportunity to make a difference in terms of delivering our environmental land management schemes, in particular Countryside Stewardship (CS), which will increase its contribution towards Defra’s 25 Year Environment Plan outcomes. Alongside this our Agency's delivery landscape is changing, focusing significantly on improving our customer’s experience with us.

As the SDM, you will have an opportunity to be at the heart of shaping the future of CS to deliver our environmental outcomes, provide a simple and straightforward scheme for farmers and land managers alongside shaping how we deliver the scheme.

The work is challenging and high profile, with a unique blend of operational delivery, stakeholder engagement and change management. You will be working with colleagues in Defra, other delivery partners and across the agency, to influence and shape the schemes, making them operationally deliverable, simple and straightforward to access.

You will be responsible initially for overseeing service development of the new CS scheme journey through the lens of operational delivery which encompasses the service (system and process design) complete with reforming operational delivery to deliver refined customer focused outcomes.

You will input into development discussions and work as part of a multi-disciplinary team alongside service design and policy colleagues to assure the operational and customer needs are understood. You will successfully support delivery of key product(s) which are part of the overall enhanced CS service design, taking products from requirements through a lifecycle to enable successful development, testing and implementation into live to realise the benefits required.

Our people matter, and with a significant amount of change happening, some of which means our people will be working in new ways, engagement and understanding is important. You will ensure our people understand where we are heading and are brought along with the work. You will ensure that these changes are understood in your team and right across the RPA.

To be successful in the role, you will need to be highly collaborative and possess strong people leadership skills. This is a rapidly changing environment and it is important that you are adaptable, resilient and prepared to be flexible to respond to changing priorities.

As an operational delivery professional, you will support the development of your teams and role model exceptional operational delivery.

Key Responsibilities are:

• You will role model exceptional operational delivery, advocate and encourage personal development and uptake of opportunities through the Operational Delivery Profession (ODP) alongside Project Delivery Profession.
• You will apply change leadership experience leading others through ambiguity and maintaining delivery of outcomes, often based on assumptions and theories.
• You will constructively challenge, influence and impact programme and policy proposals from an operational, people and customer perspective.
• You will actively engage and represent at strategic senior RPA and Defra governance meetings and workshops.
• You will be comfortable recommending and often making strategic decisions, often based on assumptions and/or incomplete evidence to provide solutions to resolve complex problems.
• You will work as part of a multi-disciplinary team (service design, policy, operational) to develop product(s) through a defined lifecycle from requirements through to implementation (products are end-to-end covering business, customer and technical).
• You will actively ensure the product(s) will deliver the right outcomes for users and to support the success of the overall programme. Managing the product delivery in such a way that the products will integrate into a seamless end-to-end service.
• You will lead a small team and will be responsible for their performance and continued development.
• You will build/maintain relationships with and influence a wide range of partners and stakeholders across a complex delivery system, ensuring that external partners (including Natural England, Forestry Commission, Historic England, other executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies that together make up Defra group) are appropriately engaged in the design, development and delivery of the product(s) – working effectively across boundaries to shape common goals and deliver integrated services.
• You will lead visibly and engagingly – Proactively and creatively engage with our people to ensure that they can contribute to development of schemes both within the Agricultural Transition Directorate and across RPA to ensure readiness for change.

The successful candidate will need to be a dynamic and adaptable leader with the ability to develop relationships and buy-in across a wide range of stakeholders and to drive delivery progress. You will be expected to handle complexity and ambiguity, deliver results quickly, be a great team player and be willing to support others and work across matrix structures.

Essential Criteria:

• Experience of leading the development and delivery of products and services which meet internal and external user needs as part of a complex and challenging programme.
• Evidence of working as part of a multi-disciplinary team to deliver high quality outcomes.
• Working effectively across boundaries to shape common goals and deliver integrated services.
• Proven evidence of a strong track record of engaging collaboratively with a range on internal and external partners who often hold competing views.
• Ability to make decisions and set direction without having the full picture and applying product and project delivery knowledge and techniques to set teams up for success, reduce ambiguity and ensure successful delivery.
• Experience of performing at high level over a sustained period, in a large organisation which has a complex operating environment, where there is uncertainty and change.
• Ability to think creatively and to respond quickly to complex changing circumstances and high-pressure situations.
• Comfortable in getting involved in technical and data architecture and linking technical and business together.
• Unwavering commitment to high standards and diversity, and the ability to develop high performing teams.

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Leadership
• Communicating and Influencing
• Making Effective Decisions
• Seeing the Big Picture

We only ask for evidence of these behaviours on your application form:

• Leadership
• Communicating and Influencing

• Learning and development tailored to your role
• An environment with flexible working options
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
• A Civil Service pension with an average employer contribution of 27%

Job contact :

Name :
Defrarecruitment.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk
Email :
Defrarecruitment.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk

Recruitment team

Email :
DefraRecruitment.grs@cabinetoffice.gov.uk