Future Borders, Technical Director, HMRC, London or Manchester, £70k to £90k

Summary

Future Borders is a cross-Government programme within the Border Delivery Group, aimed at addressing long term structural issues with how the border operates. Its vision is to create and maintain a world class border that enhances the prosperity and security of the UK and the mission is to enhance our borders, generate prosperity and protect the public. These will be achieved through designing and operating innovative border services which are integrated across government, and enhanced by strong business relationships.

Future Borders - Vision

Our vision is to create and maintain a world class border that enhances the prosperity and security of the United Kingdom. Our mission is to enhance our borders, generate prosperity and protect the public. This will be achieved through designing and operating innovative border services which are integrated across Government.

As Technical Director of Future Borders, the successful candidate will help lead and deliver change to support the enhancement of the UK Border. With passenger and goods traffic continuing to grow, there is a need for innovative solutions to support the security and prosperity agenda. With an ongoing reliance on aging border technology, continued pressures on flow and potential changes to customs declarations the case for change has never been greater, nor the opportunity to influence and deliver change cross-government and cross-industry ever more opportune.

The complexity of the border ecosystem along with the duplication and overlap between government departments would undermine the vision of a modernised and transformed UK Border. Hence, the work of Future Borders is vital as we work to: increase revenue by reducing the tax gap at the border, facilitate growth within the UK economy by enabling easier trade, enhance security through improved targeting; and improve the flow of goods and passengers across the border.

Job description

The Technical Director has primary responsibility for successful technical delivery of all Future Border programme initiatives. Establishing (agile) delivery teams & core technical capabilities in domains including; cloud infrastructure & ops, cyber security, data standards, open APIs & system interoperability, data visualisation & analytics, semantic interoperability & decision support and user need driven application development for both web and mobile delivery channels.

The objectives, responsibilities and deliverables are:

Establishing architectural principles, design patterns and governance/assurance structures to establish an evergreen evolutionary architecture optimised towards secure delivery at pace within a distributed multi-cloud and polyglot language ecosystem spanning multiple HMG departments.
Establishing appropriate agile delivery ways of working, governance and technical assurance to effectively commission, monitor and quantify delivery progress, risks and quality issues.
Establishing excellent collaborative networks across HMG and industry to support both innovation and the delivery at pace of various digital transformation initiatives within an often ambiguous and complex delivery environment.

Guidance. Provide strategic direction and guidance on technical development & delivery to the programme team and more broadly across the department and government, along with overarching architectural oversight, data & technical standard governance and stakeholder engagement required for successful outcomes.

Digital Delivery. Build and maintain a strong delivery-focused programme team. Provide leadership and direct larger multi-disciplinary teams to deliver successfully.

Risks and Issues. Responsible for ensuring technical delivery, cyber security and information governance (IG) risks and issues are identified, prioritised, assessed and mitigated. Ensuring senior stakeholders are briefed, updated and where appropriate, enrolled in the management and control of key technical risks. Identify and engage specialists to address technical risks and issues as appropriate.

Leadership & Vision. Provide strategic leadership in defining the Future Borders vision. Create a modern agile delivery environment in which delivery teams can succeed – working effectively together to innovate whilst addressing multifaceted user & business challenges affecting the border. Ensure technical delivery ultimately realises the benefits and outcomes as set out in the programme business case.

Architecture. Work with stakeholders across HMG to agree common architectural principles, technical standards and cross-government design patterns to realise a coherent technical architecture for the Future Borders programme. Taking responsibility for defining the technical architecture, in line with internet protocols and cloud era infrastructure, to minimise the barriers to delivery whilst enable innovation and avoiding unnecessary vendor lock-in.

Standards & Interoperability. Ensuring the right technical, data and semantic standards are defined and enforced across the Future Borders programme. Ensuring the ecosystem of currently disparate IT systems utilised at the border is moving towards interoperability, both within HMG and with relevant commercial operators. Where appropriate working with professional and standards bodies to achieve this goal.

Platform Delivery. Where Future Borders chooses to build central capability to support the wider border ecosystem, the Technical Director will own their delivery typically utilising agile delivery methods in line with the GDS Service Standard or through targeted procurement of commercial Products/capabilities where they satisfy the programmes established Architectural Principles

Cyber Security. Provide strategic and practical direction in modern cloud-era cyber security practises ensuring a coherent strategy is implemented to secure and protect border systems from the damage, disruption or misdirection of the services they provide

Innovation. Direct and oversee the Future Borders innovation function. Ensuring delivery teams are setup to identify, trial, adopt and scale innovation. This will include activities such as horizon scanning, working collaboratively with academia and industry whilst building and testing proofs of concepts for incubation before passing them for full scale deployment.

Digital Transformation. Working with senior stakeholders across HMG to identify transformation opportunities for the border; helping each part of the system move towards its future desired state whilst delivering the programme’s strategic objects of enhanced trade, flow, revenue and security of the border.

Business Case. Support the development of programme business cases providing direction on delivery methodology, scope, estimated costs (in both time and money) and required technical expertise. Ensuring the programme is setup to succeed in the delivery of its articulated benefits.

The Technical Director reports to the SRO & Director of Future Borders. Working collaboratively as a solid team. The Technical Director will have, four direct reports (Head of Innovation, Lead Delivery Manager, Chief Architect, and Head of Data) within a wider team of 33 people. The team are divided between the programme’s innovation, technical delivery, central architecture and data exploitation functions. The team is deployed over two sites in London, in common with the rest of the Programme. The reporting structure is matrix across the programme and will work closely with the Programme Director.

Responsibilities
Judge how best to engage with industry in the context of the implementation and adoption of technical standards (e.g. Open API or Data Standards). The postholder must guide others through this engagement and decide where specific activities or changes/amendments can or cannot go ahead.

Advise on developing programme and project scope in light of circumstances (i.e. availability and re-use potential of technical capabilities across HMG) and available funding, liaising with cross-Government stakeholders as necessary. The postholder will advise on where funding should be invested to support innovation work across the programme.

Consider the technical feasibility of proposed solutions and what benefits they are likely to deliver, judging what they are, how realistic their delivery is and how they might be realised, in part to support longer-term delivery roadmaps and resource planning.

Provide or oversee critical briefings for internal and external stakeholders on the technical/delivery scope of the programme and progress being made, and ensuring that technical decisions made through the Design Authority are realised.

Undertakes day to day delivery team oversight and provides direction and challenge to teams as required depending on the subject matter under consideration (e.g. deviations from the GDS Service Standard, Future Borders values or agile ways of working).

Provide advice on how Future Borders work fits with departmental proposals and plans, including any technical or architectural implications.

Input into other Department’s boards in relation to technical matters.

The successful candidate will be technically skilled as well as an influential leader. In addition to holding professional qualifications (see qualifications section below), you must be able to demonstrate your potential and capability in the following areas:

• An excellent leader and manager, with experience of building capability and driving continuous improvement;
• Strong interpersonal, negotiating and influencing skills, with the ability to build effective relationships and work in partnership with senior stakeholders, both internally and externally; and
• The ability to work flexibly and at pace, juggling competing and often short-term demands across a wide range of business priorities.
• Significant IT delivery & agile product delivery experience demonstrated in a range of circumstances, including GMPP projects / digital transformation programmes and complex environments spanning across HMG and industry.
• Extensive experience of leading multi-disciplinary delivery teams at scale in complex environments through proven leadership skills coupled with the ability to motivate & inspire continuous improvement & innovation.
• Extensive experience of developing and recommending strategies and adoption of emerging technologies based on evidence and analysis to foster technical innovation.
• Considerable experience in open standards development with a sector-wide or international standards body and in a complex environment.
• Experience and knowhow to shape development of technical data architectures and guide multiple concurrent product development lifecycles at scale in complex environments.
• Experience of building and leading technical Communities of Practice in a relevant technical domain (e.g. Open APIs, Data Standards or Semantic Interoperability).
• Evidence of continued professional development with completion or enrolment on industry recognised courses; ideally coupled with professional membership of a recognised body, e.g. BCS.

Qualifications
• Masters level engineering or equivalent degree, or demonstrable relevant experience
• Desirable: In-depth knowledge of border related products and services across government organisations.
• Experience authoring, peer reviewing and implementing to either national or international ISO standards to support new product

Benefits

• Learning and development tailored to your role
• An environment with flexible working options
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
• A Civil Service pension

Whatever your role, we take your career and development seriously, and want to enable you to build a really successful career with the Department and wider Civil Service. It is crucial that our employees have the right skills to develop their careers and meet the challenges ahead, and you’ll benefit from regular performance and development reviews to ensure this development is ongoing. As a Civil Service employee, you’ll be entitled to a large range of benefits.

This includes:

25 days annual leave on entry, increasing on a sliding scale to 30 days after 5 years’ service. This is in addition to 8 public holidays and an additional paid day to mark the Queen’s Birthday.

• A competitive contributory pension scheme that you can enter as soon as you join where we will make a significant contribution to the cost of your pension; where your contributions come out of your salary before any tax is taken; and where your pension will continue to provide valuable benefits for you and your family if you are too ill to continue to work or die before you retire.
• Flexible working and access to flexible working schemes allowing you to vary your working day as long as you work your total contractual hours.
• Generous paid maternity and paternity leave which is notably more than the statutory minimum offered by many other employers.
• Childcare benefits: the Government has introduced the Tax-Free Childcare scheme. Working parents can open an On-line childcare account and for every £8 they pay in, the Government adds £2, up to a maximum of £2000 a year for each child or £4000 for a disabled child. Parents then use the funds to pay for registered childcare. Existing employees may be able to continue to claim childcare vouchers, so please check how the policy would work for you here.
• Interest-free loans allowing you to spread the cost of an annual travel season ticket or a new bicycle.
• The opportunity to use onsite facilities including fitness centres and staff canteens (where applicable).
• Occupational sick pay.