Vendor Management Office Lead

A well known university is seeking to recruit a Vendor Management Office Lead contract role as part of a large transformation programme to start asap paying £650/day outside IR35 for an initial 6 month contract with the opportunity to extend.

Role Purpose

The VMO Lead is responsible for designing, building and mobilising the Vendor Management Office that will govern the university’s relationship with its strategic Managed Service Provider (MSP), and for handing over a fully operational function to permanent leadership at the end of the engagement.

This is a build role rather than a run role. The postholder creates the governance framework, performance and commercial management mechanisms, risk and assurance routines, and retained organisation design required to hold the MSP to account from the first day of service commencement. Every output is expected to be documented and transferable rather than held as personal knowledge.

The role carries no line management responsibility. The postholder provides functional direction, coaching and structured knowledge transfer to VMO Officers as they are appointed, and supports recruitment through role definition and capability assessment, but permanent people management sits with the university.

The engagement excludes ownership of BAU service delivery and does not substitute for the MSP’s own service management obligations.

Key Responsibilities

• Design the VMO target operating model, defining purpose, scope, service boundaries and interfaces with Procurement, Finance, Legal, Technology, People and Change, and Risk
• Define the retained organisation structure, roles, capability requirements and resourcing plan needed to govern the MSP, including role profiles to support permanent recruitment
• Produce the VMO implementation roadmap covering mobilisation, transition and steady state, with milestones, dependencies and readiness criteria
• Define decision rights, accountabilities and the RACI between the university and the MSP, and between the VMO and retained service owners
• Baseline the executed MSP contract, extracting obligations, commitments, dependencies and milestones into a managed obligations register with named owners and due dates
• Establish the contract management framework covering variations, change control, change order pricing principles, renewal points and exit provisions
• Design the charging model validation approach, including resource units, volume bands, consumption tracking and invoice verification routines
• Design the performance management framework covering SLAs, KPIs and XLAs, including measurement definitions, data sources, calculation rules, evidence requirements and dispute resolution for contested measures
• Build performance scorecards and reporting packs for operational, tactical and executive audiences, ensuring a single agreed version of the truth between the university and the MSP
• Define service credit, earn back and remedy processes, and the service improvement plan mechanism used where performance falls below contracted levels
• Establish the baseline measurement period approach and the criteria for moving services from transition into steady state
• Establish the governance calendar and forum structure, from operational service reviews through to executive relationship boards, with defined terms of reference, membership, inputs, outputs and quorum
• Define escalation, issue and dispute management processes, including thresholds, routes and timescales
• Establish continuous improvement and innovation mechanisms, covering how ideas are raised, assessed, funded, tracked and evidenced through to benefit realisation
• Establish financial controls across the vendor relationship, covering budget tracking, consumption monitoring, forecast against actual, and early identification of volume and cost variances
• Define the benefits and savings tracking approach, linking contracted commercial commitments to realised outcomes and to the CSTP business case assumptions
• Establish the vendor risk framework covering operational, financial, regulatory, data protection, information security and reputational risk, and populate the associated risk register and issues log
• Define due diligence, assurance and audit routines, including exercise of right to audit, control attestations, subcontractor oversight and fourth party visibility
• Define business continuity, disaster recovery, step in and exit assurance requirements, and confirm the MSP can evidence them
• Where the environment is multi vendor, define the service integration model, including cross vendor dependencies, end to end accountability and collaboration obligations
• Govern MSP delivery against the transition plan, providing independent assurance at each transition gate and advising the programme on readiness to accept service
• Act as escalation point for supplier issues raised by the university’s stakeholders during mobilisation, and establish the permanent escalation route that replaces this at handover
• Prepare and present supplier performance, risk and commercial reporting to senior governance forums, with clear recommendations rather than data alone
• Produce the VMO handbook, playbooks and template library so the function can be operated by others without the postholder present
• Run the function in shadow with the permanent team, then complete structured handover to permanent VMO leadership against agreed exit criteria

Skills & Experience – Essential

• Demonstrable experience of designing and standing up a VMO, SIAM or equivalent retained governance function from scratch, evidenced by at least one build the candidate can describe in detail, rather than experience only of running an established function
• Experience of MSP or BPO contract mobilisation and transition governance, including transition gates, service acceptance and baseline periods
• Strong contract and commercial capability, covering obligations management, change control, service credit regimes and validation of supplier charging models
• Proven capability in performance framework design, including definition and measurement of SLAs, KPIs and XLAs, and resolution of measurement disputes
• Strong vendor risk, assurance and compliance experience, including due diligence, audit and control review
• Experience operating across multiple service scopes, ideally including corporate functions such as Finance, HR, Payroll and IT
• Credibility with executive stakeholders, combined with the confidence to hold a large and capable supplier to account on evidence
• Ability to work at pace and produce documented, transferable artefacts suitable for immediate use by a permanent team
• Excellent written, verbal and presentation skills for executive decision making

Skills & Experience – Desirable

• Experience in Higher Education or comparable public sector environments
• Experience of service integration in multi vendor or multi tower environments
• Familiarity with global delivery models, offshore hubs and associated scalability and change order considerations
• Experience of TUPE affected transitions and the governance implications that follow
• SIAM, ITIL, WorldCC or IACCM, CIPS, or comparable professional certification
• Experience of establishing benefits tracking that survives handover into BAU

If interested in this role, please send your CV across asap. 

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