Change & Adoption Lead (SC Cleared)

Job Title: Change & Adoption Lead (SC Cleared)

Location: Hybrid (up to 2 office days at client's site in London)

Contract Length: 6 months (with scope to extend)

Start Date: ASAP

IR35: Inside

Interview Process: 1 Stage, MS Teams

Clearance Required: SC (needs to have been used within the past 10 months)

We are supporting a government client in hiring a Change & Adoption Lead to establish, govern and continuously improve a new change and adoption capability within a large engineering transformation function.

This is active change leadership within a transformation programme, not ITIL-style application change management. The successful candidate will build the function from the ground up, owning the change operating model and ensuring a consistent, repeatable approach across interventions. The role covers stakeholder engagement, communications, readiness, adoption, service transition support, governance and reporting, and benefits adoption, ensuring transformation outcomes are not only delivered but successfully adopted, Embedded and sustained.

This is a demanding role in a fast-moving environment with shifting priorities. It suits a resilient, persistent change professional with prior experience of change programme transformations, who can adapt quickly, influence senior stakeholders and provide dependable availability throughout the working week.

Key Responsibilities

• Establish and maintain the Change Operating Model, including the change life cycle, methodology, governance, standards, templates, toolkit and RACI
• Lead stakeholder engagement and communications, maintaining stakeholder registers and maps, engagement and communication plans, and executive briefings
• Run readiness and adoption activity, including readiness assessments, adoption barriers, adoption plans, measures, dashboards and heatmaps
• Provide change input into intervention mobilisation and discovery, identifying change impacts and organisational dependencies and contributing to charters
• Consolidate engagement across Service Delivery Managers and operational stakeholders, identifying service impacts and supporting readiness planning
• Support service transition into receiving organisations, assessing transition readiness, risks and dependencies and supporting service landing
• Provide governance, RAID and reporting, including a weekly change report, executive dashboard, RAID log, dependency register and governance packs
• Provide leadership with organisational change insight, including impact analysis, change heatmaps and recommendations
• Support benefits adoption by defining adoption indicators, linking adoption activity to benefits and reporting barriers to benefit achievement
• Maintain a visible backlog, manage agreed commitments, track delivery dates and dependency owners, and escalate slippage and risks early
• Apply evidence-based reporting with standard RAG definitions and accurate forecasts, aligned to governance standards

Essential Skills

• Proven experience leading change and adoption within large-scale transformation programmes, including establishing new change functions (this is not ITIL application change management)
• Experience defining and embedding a change operating model, including life cycle, methodology, governance, standards, templates and RACI
• Strong stakeholder engagement and influencing skills at senior level, including managing conflicting expectations and demanding stakeholders
• Experience running change impact, readiness and adoption assessments, and linking adoption measures to benefits
• Experience planning stakeholder communications and engagement, including executive briefings
• Experience supporting service transition and handover into receiving operational teams
• Strong governance, RAID, dependency management and evidence-based reporting, including executive dashboards and RAG reporting
• Ability to commit protected capacity and dependable availability throughout the agreed working week, responding promptly to priority requests

Personal Attributes

• Tough, resilient and persistent, with the drive to push a new function forward in a demanding environment
• Adaptable, able to respond quickly to changing priorities and shifting requirements
• Confident and constructive when challenging and influencing senior stakeholders
• Self-directed, comfortable building a function from the ground up
• Proactive in escalating risks, transparent about workload and slippage, and accountable for commitments
• Reliable and dependable, with clear communication about availability