Commercial Lead/Business Partner - Security

The Cabinet Office and HM Treasury operate at the heart of the UK government. These iconic departments are responsible for ensuring the effective running of government, maintaining control over public spending and working to achieve strong and sustainable growth for the UK.

The Cabinet Office & HM Treasury (COHMT) Commercial team has a vision to be a top performing commercial function in government, setting best practices for others to follow. It offers a unique challenge to commercial professionals who want to work on some of the UKs most important policy issues. The team works in partnership with all areas of the business, providing a commercial service that covers planning, commercial strategy, sourcing and contract management on circa 1bn of third party spend.

The COHMT Commercial team operates with our core values in mind which are:

We are Curious, Collaborative and Kind, we act with Integrity and are Focused on value for money.

We are looking for a talented commercial professional to join the team and help to shape and influence commercial and procurement strategies within the department. This role will be challenging and hands-on, and will require expert stakeholder management skills as well as a strong grasp of commercial processes and the challenges of procuring goods and services in Central Government.

The COHMT commercial team has recently undergone a change to its operating model and is now organised into spend category teams which are supplemented by business partners and embedded commercial teams in specialist areas and programmes. The directorate is supported by a central team responsible for the overall strategy and enabling functions.

This role uniquely combines strategic business partnering activities with hands-on procurement delivery for a range of requirements. You will act as a senior commercial advisor to the business, providing expert commercial advice as part of the wider commercial team. You will be expected to provide commercial guidance and support to enable appropriate decision making and maximise value for money both in new procurement activity and existing supplier management, able to act under your own initiative and lead and drive commercial projects, engaging and influencing key stakeholders within your areas of responsibility.

At the same time, you will work with other commercial team members to enable continuous improvement and commercial capability development with your customers, working to implement new policies and processes as required. You will often be working on projects that require extra levels of sensitivity, making SC clearance a requirement for this role.

Locations

The successful candidate(s) will be able to agree a contractual workplace from those locations listed in this advert. When selecting your location listed in this job advert please be aware that this will be your contractual base location with a requirement to spend a minimum of 60% of your working time in this organisational workplace.

Your time spent on official duties at workplace locations other than your contractual office such as supplier, customer or partner locations required to perform your role is included in the 60% attendance.

This requirement will however take into consideration any reasonable adjustments agreed upon appointment for people with a disability, flexibilities agreed for those with specific caring responsibilities, or other similar temporary flexibilities.

The successful candidate will:

• Act as a commercial advisor to the department, providing advice, guidance and support to customers to enable commercial opportunities and consequences to be understood;
• Build effective relationships with your customers (and when applicable across other central government organisations), fostering trust and transparency in order to allow you to provide the best level of commercial advice and guidance;
• Work with other team members to enable continual improvement and commercial capability development across the business unit
• Provide hands-on targeted procurement or contract management support where required, for example where a contract or procurement activity is identified as being at risk or of high importance;
• Enable your customers to act as intelligent customers to the Government Commercial Agency, advising them in creating their requirements and considering Commercial strategy and planning;
• Work with the Head of Commercial to implement any new governmental commercial policies across the department, engaging with the Government Commercial Function and other cross government departments where necessary;
• Take responsibility for ensuring that a robust commercial pipeline and contracts register is in place for the business unit, working in partnership with the central Commercial Pipeline Manager;
• Provide input to Management reports and other requests for information as required;
• Support in building category strategies where appropriate;
• Contribute to creating a great place to work, championing diversity and inclusive ways of working and proactively participating in improvement activities across the Commercial Directorate.