Project Support Officer - 12 month Fixed Term Contract

Project Support Officer

Fixed Term, Full Time

Up to £31,283 per annum

Location: Chelmsford

Please note that this is a fixed term contract / secondment opportunity for a period of 12 months.

The Opportunity

The Council have several innovative and exciting projects to be delivered and require experienced professionals to bring these to fruition. We deliver a variety of projects that help Essex County Council to:

• Deliver the Adult Social Care vision of people living life to the fullest.
• Strengthen family resilience and stability and achieve educational excellence and high standards for all children and young people.
• Create services that drive excellent customer experience through partners, co-locations and digital interactions.
• Lead behaviour change and implement the infrastructure needed for a net zero Essex by 2050.
• Create the right conditions to enable and empower the people of Essex to lead healthy, happy and fulfilling lives.
• Drive efficiency and effectiveness to enable service excellence.

The responsibilities of the Project Support Officer cover a diverse range of activities to support the delivery of tasks aligned to a project, programme, or portfolio. You will be working primarily alongside a Programme Manager, and will enable the smooth running of specific programme/projects, through the co-ordination of business management actions and activities on their behalf. Other requirements will focus on development of key documents and reporting, monitoring the progress of specific programme, projects or work-streams, whilst overseeing; with direction; small projects, as required.

The ideal candidate will need to be organised and able to prioritise effectively, and have strong communication and interpersonal skills, as well as having experience engaging with stakeholders at different levels within an organisation.

You'll be joining an award-winning team, recognised in the recent APM Project Management Awards, winning 'Public Sector Organisation of the Year Award 2023'.

You can find out more about this and the teams achievements in our blog.

Accountabilities

• Support the teams by maintaining appropriate systems to ensure effective planning and scheduling of projects or programmes.
• Support the team by assisting them in maintaining project controls and producing project reports to ensure adequate and regular monitoring of project progress.
• Responsible for programme/project file management using robust version control and organising programme/project boards and meetings, together with providing support to ensure efficient operation of day to day activities.
• Supports the programme/project teams by being a main point of contact for responses to external requests for information and engaging with both internal and external contacts.
• Supports the teams by monitoring programme/project spend and contribute to the compilation of budget updates whilst also ensuring updates of other tasks, such as, maintaining risk and issue logs and clearly documenting decisions.
• Supports the team by sharing any insights or escalating issues to ensure Programme and Projects Managers are kept up to date.
• Specific individual and shared targets and objectives are defined annually within the performance management framework.

The Experience You Will Bring

Essential:

• Educated to GCSE or equivalent by experience
• Evidence of continuing professional development and knowledge in relevant professional area.
• Experience and evidence of working in a project support role in a large, complex organisation
• Curious and inspired to work in an agile environment where you can learn and develop

Desirable:

• Experience of engaging with others to build good working relationships and communicating effectively
• Experience of working with a broad range of individuals at different levels within the organisation and engaging with them.
• Experience of working within a political environment with knowledge of a public sector setting and involvement in a large, complex environment
• Evidence of adopting a structured and planned approach