PMO Director

The Brief

Heathrow retained our services to recruit a PMO Director reporting directly into the Development Director for Heathrow’s Q6 capex investment programme. This role is responsible for PMO reporting, analysis and portfolio management of a £3bn capex programme to ensure it’s on track, to time and within budget.

The Process

Our talent mapping focused on individuals with experience of leading PMO and Programme Controls functions for significant construction clients, as well as candidates with previous client-side experience currently working within consultancies, project delivery firms and contractors. The talent pools we researched included;

• Major infrastructure projects and asset owners
• Consultancies
• Project Delivery firms
• Complex capital project organisations in other environments, including Oil & Gas and Defence.

Being based at Heathrow full-time presented a challenge, as it is not always easily accessible to many in the South East. To overcome this, we emphasised the long-term benefits of working for a progressive construction client such as Heathrow and the stability of the location.

We took a project led approach researching major projects in the South and networking our contacts to identify who the key PMO and programme controls leaders on these projects.

Our team identified 95 potential candidates, which we narrowed down to 10 people for competency based interviewed by Newsom Consulting and selecting 5 exceptionally strong options presented at shortlist to the client.

The Outcome

We were successful in recruiting a Head of PMO & Cost Planning from another multi-£billion mega project who was employed directly by the client organisation and fit the salary band. The candidate had also previously been seconded to Heathrow from a consulting firm, and so was an excellent overall fit for the role.