PMO Lead - Retail

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.

You will act as the primary point of accountability for ensuring the retail function is appropriately engaged, assessed and protected across the FY27 transformation portfolio. The Retail PMO Lead identifies all projects with a retail impact, ensures that impact is understood and governed, and works with project teams and retail stakeholders to manage risk, readiness and delivery quality on behalf of stores and the wider retail operation.

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. Historically, retail impact assessment has been embedded within individual project delivery, creating inconsistency in how stores are engaged and protected.

This role establishes a dedicated, function-level PMO capability within the Retail domain. It is not a project role. Its purpose is to provide horizontal oversight and assurance across all portfolio activity touching retail, ensuring that the business is not exposed to unmanaged change in stores and that retail stakeholders have a clear, consolidated view of what is coming and when.

Role overview:

Retail Impact Identification & Triage

• Maintain a live registry of all active and planned portfolio projects with a retail footprint, drawing from Planview, CCB submissions, and New Demand / 3YP pipeline.
• Triage and classify retail impact by type (technology, process, colleague, customer, trading) and severity, escalating material risks to the Head of Portfolio and relevant Head of in retail.
• Work with the Enterprise PMO to embed retail impact as a mandatory assessment checkpoint in the CCB stage gate process.

Retail Readiness & Impact Assessment

• Lead structured impact assessments for projects entering delivery or go-live phases, coordinating input from Retail Operations, Store Experience, and commercial teams.
• Define and track retail readiness criteria for each impacting project, ensuring deployment readiness is evidenced before significant change lands in stores.
• Challenge project teams where retail impact is insufficiently assessed or where proposed timelines create unacceptable risk to store operations or trading performance.

Stakeholder Engagement & Communication

• Serve as the primary interface between the Portfolio & Delivery PMO function and retail leadership, providing a consolidated view of upcoming change, dependencies, and risk.
• Produce a regular Retail Change Calendar, giving retail stakeholders clear forward visibility of impacting projects, key dates, and change volumes.
• Facilitate retail input into project SteerCos and relevant governance forums where retail impact is material.

Governance & Assurance

• Own the Retail PMO risk log — tracking risks and issues arising from portfolio activity that could affect retail performance or colleague experience.
• Support the CCB processes by providing retail impact assessments for relevant submissions, ensuring that decision-makers have adequate retail context before approvals are granted.

Continuous Improvement

• Identify systemic patterns in how retail is impacted by portfolio activity and recommend structural improvements to planning, sequencing, or governance processes.
• Contribute to the development of Enterprise PMO standards and tooling to embed retail impact thinking at the point of project initiation.
• Support the annual planning cycle by providing retail impact data and capacity insight to inform FY project prioritisation, sequencing, and demand decisions ahead of the next financial year plan.

Required Skills & Experience:

• Proven PMO or programme assurance experience in a large, complex portfolio.
• Experience working with or within a retail operations, store experience, or trading environment.
• Demonstrable experience of managing stakeholder relationships at senior level.
• Experience of governance frameworks including change control, investment governance, or SteerCo management.
• Strong analytical and risk assessment skills, with ability to synthesise complex information for senior audiences.
• Clear, confident communication skills — written and verbal.
• Ability to challenge constructively and hold project teams to account without direct line authority.
• Comfortable operating across ambiguous, cross-functional environments.
• Proficient in Microsoft Office suite, particularly PowerPoint and Excel.
• 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 [email protected] and we'll do our best to help.