Operational Excellence Process Lead

As an Operational Excellence Process Lead within the Legal COO Operational Excellence team, you will design, implement, and embed a robust enterprise-wide process taxonomy for the Legal function, enabling transparency, consistency, and effective governance. You will lead process mapping, evaluation, and continuous improvement initiatives, working closely with Legal service teams, Risk, Compliance, and the Data Office to identify and deliver operational efficiency opportunities. You will act as a change leader, engaging stakeholders across Legal and Technology to prioritise improvements, support automation opportunities, and drive a culture of continuous improvement. You will also manage the delivery of a structured improvement programme, ensuring alignment with strategic goals and regulatory standards.

To be successful as an Operational Excellence Process Lead, you should have experience with:

• Proven experience in process mapping, taxonomy design, and continuous improvement delivery.
• Stakeholder engagement and change skills across cross-functional teams.
• Familiarity with improvement methodologies (e.g. Lean, Six Sigma); certification preferred but not essential.
• Experience using IBM Blueworks or similar process mapping tools
• Ability to translate process insights into actionable improvements, with a focus on technology and data enablement.

You may be assessed on the key critical skills relevant for success in role, such as risk and controls, change and transformation, business acumen strategic thinking and digital and technology, as well as job-specific technical skills

Your role can be located from Manchester or Birmingham

Purpose of the role To support the organisation, achieve its strategic objectives by ensuring the business is ready to receive the agreed change (address business problems and opportunities), ensuring that change initiatives are successfully assessed and implemented to enable them to be embedded in the organisation.

Accountabilities

• Identification and analysis of business impact and opportunities that require change within the organisation.
• Development of business readiness strategies that will help to ensure the successful implementation of change initiatives.
• Communication with stakeholders, including senior management, project teams, and external partners, to ensure that they are informed about change initiatives and that their needs and expectations are being met.
• Collaboration with Client Readiness, Operational Readiness & Tech Delivery to ensure business, sales, operations, client servicing and functional partners are prepared for a smooth transition of technology delivery into BAU (including Target Operating Model, Training, Communications, Service Agreements.) .
• Management of resistance to change, ensuring that stakeholders are engaged and that their concerns are addressed.
• Review of business readiness plans and status reports in conjunction with change delivery managers to ensure business readiness activities completed on time including newly identified risks, issues and dependencies.
• Collaboration with project teams to ensure that change initiatives are aligned with project objectives and that change management activities are integrated into project plans.
• Provision of guidance and support to business stakeholders, ensuring that they have the necessary skills and knowledge to implement change initiatives successfully.

Vice President Expectations

• To contribute or set strategy, drive requirements and make recommendations for change. Plan resources, budgets, and policies; manage and maintain policies/ processes; deliver continuous improvements and escalate breaches of policies/procedures..
• If managing a team, they define jobs and responsibilities, planning for the department’s future needs and operations, counselling employees on performance and contributing to employee pay decisions/changes. They may also lead a number of specialists to influence the operations of a department, in alignment with strategic as well as tactical priorities, while balancing short and long term goals and ensuring that budgets and schedules meet corporate requirements..
• If the position has leadership responsibilities, People Leaders are expected to demonstrate a clear set of leadership behaviours to create an environment for colleagues to thrive and deliver to a consistently excellent standard. The four LEAD behaviours are: L – Listen and be authentic, E – Energise and inspire, A – Align across the enterprise, D – Develop others..
• OR for an individual contributor, they will be a subject matter expert within own discipline and will guide technical direction. They will lead collaborative, multi-year assignments and guide team members through structured assignments, identify the need for the inclusion of other areas of specialisation to complete assignments. They will train, guide and coach less experienced specialists and provide information affecting long term profits, organisational risks and strategic decisions..
• Advise key stakeholders, including functional leadership teams and senior management on functional and cross functional areas of impact and alignment.
• Manage and mitigate risks through assessment, in support of the control and governance agenda.
• Demonstrate leadership and accountability for managing risk and strengthening controls in relation to the work your team does.
• Demonstrate comprehensive understanding of the organisation functions to contribute to achieving the goals of the business.
• Collaborate with other areas of work, for business aligned support areas to keep up to speed with business activity and the business strategies.
• Create solutions based on sophisticated analytical thought comparing and selecting complex alternatives. In-depth analysis with interpretative thinking will be required to define problems and develop innovative solutions.
• Adopt and include the outcomes of extensive research in problem solving processes.
• Seek out, build and maintain trusting relationships and partnerships with internal and external stakeholders in order to accomplish key business objectives, using influencing and negotiating skills to achieve outcomes.

All colleagues will be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Values of Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence and Stewardship – our moral compass, helping us do what we believe is right. They will also be expected to demonstrate the Barclays Mindset – to Empower, Challenge and Drive – the operating manual for how we behave.