Senior Strategy Manager

NHS Property Services have a fantastic opportunity for a Senior Strategy Manager to join our organisation, based around the Birmingham area of West Midlands.  This is permanent role with a salary of between £60,000 - £72,956, Car Allowance & Bonus. The role will attract 27 days holiday.

​​​​​​​This role is mainly home based, with occasional site visits required as per business requirements. Working hours are Monday to Friday, 0900-1730, with some flexibility where agreed.

The main purpose of the role: 

• To support the short and longer-term development of our own property portfolio strategy by engaging with our customers, tenants, occupiers, and other stakeholders, at a senior level to drive the efficient and effective use of our part of the NHS estate.  
• The estate strategy team will seek to understand national and local healthcare and workforce policy and priorities, to support assessment of options around NHSPS property portfolio to ensure that the estate is occupied on an optimal basis, correctly specified to support customer needs, delivers best value, and is fit for purpose to support patient and clinician needs.  
• Recommendations will drive decision making and gain commitment from stakeholders around positioning of the properties, unlocking future development or disposal opportunities for surplus sites.  

The role requires strong property, business, political and financial acumen to provide pragmatic solutions to deliver savings and estate optimisation, whilst balancing effectively the interests of NHSPS and the needs of the wider health and social care system. You will need to develop an excellent understanding of the potential of the NHSPS portfolio in your geographic/functional area, and to help drive efficiencies to optimise the portfolio, through property consolidation, enabling disposals, driving value from lease events and where relevant the “right-sizing” of new developments.  

Managers play an important role at NHSPS.  They are the conduit between senior managers and leaders and the colleagues across the business who deliver for our customers and who keep the business running smoothly.  Their teams are made up of specialists and team contributors, and typically they are responsible for the delivery of defined elements of the strategy and operating plans.  

Managers frequently share the same professional and technical backgrounds as their teams, and their role is to manage and coach their teams to deliver in line with targets and performance standards.   

The focus of the Senior Strategy Manager:

• To manage the formulation and delivery, review, and implementation of portfolio strategies on a geographic or customer driven or similar basis. 
• Work with our customers, tenants, occupiers, and the Investment Management team to develop and deliver a strategy for a pipeline of disposal opportunities 
• Work with our customers and the Development Team to generate new property development opportunities and the Town Planning Team to optimise the potential use of existing or surplus health care properties. 
• Undertake options assessments to develop location, or site-specific strategies to drive planning for lease events, the use of vacant and sessional space policies. 
• Working on the national office strategy, to ensure consistent occupational metrics are applied, enable consolidation/disposals, and value to be extracted from lease events across a large programme with significant financial opportunity over the next five years 
• Working with occupiers to help them obtain relevant business case approvals to commit to carry through the implementation of those schemes aligning with NHSPS estate strategy 
• Responsible for identifying and delivering opportunities for rationalisation, investment, and disinvestment in our portfolio; to rationalise our properties to meet our 3-year strategic business plan  
• The estate strategy team will be responsible for developing projects up until the point of agreed business cases (customer) and Initiative Approval Process (IAP) (Internal), at which point the projects will be handed over to other NHS PS teams either within Asset Management or Construction, dependent upon the project  

Core elements of the role: 

• Utilise a consistent, staged process for scoping and evaluating projects to ensure stakeholder alignment throughout the process, seeking to identify at an early-stage financial viability and deliverability of schemes, to prevent unnecessary work to PS and the healthcare system 
• Analyse, assess and where relevant, challenge, all proposed property opportunities, based on sound financial, and qualitative, evidence-based analysis, working in conjunction with the PS Evaluation and Analysis team and NHSE&I approving bodies, to progress through the approval processes 
• Be responsible for project specific budgets where external consultants input is required, act as informed client and manage consultants, ensuring they are appropriately procured, they have an appropriate brief and are well managed to ensure their outputs are both suitable for the purpose and value for money 
• Help support development of best practice in relation to estate optimisation and where required share across regional teams in the wider organisation 
• Analyse complex information to make appropriate recommendations and support portfolio decisions 
• Work as ambassadors for the NHSPS vacant space policy, supporting commissioners to identify options for repurposing or to identify properties that may become surplus and eligible for entry into the vacant space scheme. 
• Supporting the identification of space suitable for sessional use to be incorporated into the sessional space portfolio, and work with the Investment Management team to engage with customers around this 
• Customer and stakeholder engagement to support the effective delivery of key projects contained in the Healthy Places programme. 
• Acting as an Ambassador for NHSPS through professionalism, knowledge, and a proven track record of delivery of asset projects, including cost savings and disposals against an agreed target. 
• Update and maintain a detailed record of on-going work, within the Healthy Places tracker, to record progress and added value to NHSPS 
• More generally the expectation of managers is: 
• Recruits and onboards new team members so that all new starters have a ‘best welcome’ 
• Clarifies priorities, plans, and goals/performance standards for their team; creates an inclusive, high performing culture where colleagues can develop and thrive 
• Provides reporting on productivity and other KPIs. 
• Provides coaching and performance feedback to team members 
• Brings professional best practice to their roles and teams 
• Spots opportunities to improve processes and practises  
• Shares technical/professional skills and knowledge 
• Oversees service delivery to internal and external customers at agreed performance levels  
• Manages budgets in line with forecast (where appropriate) 
• Adheres to the appropriate governance and compliance standards for professional area 
• Manages internal and external customer relationship 

This role will require you to demonstrate the following Experience, Capabilities and Knowledge:

• Experience of line management in a busy, customer focused business 
• Experience of driving improvements to enable efficiency 
• Experience of delivering change 
• Track record of success in professional area 
• Experience of customer relationship management 
• Experience of working in partnership with public-private organisations for project delivery 
• Professional/technical know how 
• Commercial and financial acumen 
• Relevant legislative/regulatory frameworks 
• Broad understanding of modern people practices 
• Understanding of Primary Care Policy in the NHS 
• Excellent knowledge of property strategies and strategic asset management across a broad portfolio of properties 
• Knowledge of working in a complex political environment  
• Working knowledge of negotiating headleases, subleases and property transactions 
• Planning and delivery/implementation skills 
• Tracking and reporting KPIs 
• Data-driven decision making 
• Budget management 
• NHSPS ‘engage and enable’ leadership behaviours 
• Stakeholder management 
• Continuous improvement 
• Customer focus 
• People management and coaching skills 
• Colleague engagement/wellbeing 
• Taking personal accountability  
• Degree level in estate management or a related discipline with relevant professional experience 
• Member of a professional estates body for example RICS, RTPI, RIBA ​​​​​​​