Role overview:
PMO Lead (Retail)
Waterloo - Hybrid Working
Full Time
Fixed Term Contract (12 Months)
Grade 4
At Currys we’re united by one passion: to help everyone enjoy amazing technology. As the UK’s best-known retailer of tech, we’re proud of the service our customers receive – and it’s all down to our team of 25,000 caring and committed colleagues. Working as one team, we learn and grow together, celebrating the big and small moments that make every day amazing.
The Currys FY27 portfolio includes a significant number of projects that directly affect retail operations — from technology deployments and systems changes to colleague experience and trading interventions. The role needs two lenses working together. Strategically, it joins the dots across the whole portfolio: dependencies, cumulative change load on a store, clashes with peak trading, and what the year adds up to for retail. At delivery level, it interrogates individual projects hard enough to know whether the plan in front of it is real. You will act as the senior point of accountability for how the transformation portfolio lands in stores — what is coming, whether retail is genuinely ready, and what we do when it is not. The Retail Portfolio Lead owns the consolidated retail view of the portfolio and uses it to make and defend recommendations.
Role overview:
• Own a single trusted picture of every project with a retail footprint, drawn from Planview, CCB submissions, and the New Demand / 3YP pipeline, current enough to make decisions from.
• Classify retail impact by type (technology, process, colleague, customer, trading) and severity, exercising judgement on what genuinely warrants senior attention rather than escalating everything.
• Publish a forward Retail Change Calendar giving retail leadership real visibility of change volume, sequencing, and pinch points, including peak trading
• Read risk across the portfolio rather than project by project — cumulative change load on a store, clashes between go-lives, and the aggregate colleague and customer exposure no single project owner can see.
• Map dependencies between projects, functions, and third parties, including those nobody has declared, and trace where a slip in one place surfaces as a failure somewhere else.
• Lead retail impact and readiness assessments for projects entering delivery and go-live, coordinating Retail Operations, Store Experience, Commercial, and Technology.
• Act as the senior interface between the Portfolio & Delivery function and retail leadership — the person both sides call when the plan and the shop floor disagree.
• Work with the Enterprise PMO to embed retail impact as a mandatory assessment checkpoint in the CCB stage gate process, and enforce it in practice.
• Identify the patterns behind repeat failures — sequencing, capacity, late engagement — and recommend structural improvements to planning and governance.
This is a senior, function-level leadership role within the Retail domain. It is not a project role, not a PMO administration role, and not a reporting role. There are no direct reports; authority comes from judgement, credibility with retail leadership, and the quality of the evidence put in front of decision-makers.
Required Skills & Experience:
• Substantial experience at senior manager or head-of level in PMO, portfolio, programme, or transformation leadership within a large, complex organisation.
• A track record of owning and defending difficult recommendations in front of director-level and executive audiences, including delaying, de-scoping, or stopping work others wanted to proceed.
• Demonstrable experience mediating between functions with competing priorities and landing an agreed way forward without escalation as the default.
• A genuine strategic lens: able to step back and say what the portfolio adds up to for retail, and switch straight back down to whether one go-live is safe this weekend.
• Strong on dependencies and second-order impact — finds the connections nobody has declared and can explain how a slip in one project becomes a failure in another.
• Deep, first-hand understanding of retail operations: what a store day looks like, what peak trading costs, and what change feels like on the shop floor.
• Credibility with senior retail and commercial leaders, earned through delivery rather than title; comfortable being the most challenging voice in the room and still being invited back.
• Strong judgement under incomplete information: forms a defensible position quickly, states what would change their mind, and separates material risk from noise.
• Experience with portfolio management tooling (e.g. Planview or equivalent) is desirable.
Why join us:
Join our team and we'll be with you every step of the way, helping you develop the career you want with new opportunities, on-going training and skills for life.
Not only can you shape your own future, but you can help take charge of ours too. As the biggest recycler and repairer of tech in the UK, we’re in a position to make a real impact on people and the planet.
Every voice has a space at our table and we're committed to making inclusion and diversity part of everything we do, including how we strengthen our workforce. We want to make sure you have a fair opportunity to show us your talents during our application process, so if you need any additional assistance with your application please email careers@currys.co.uk and we'll do our best to help.
