About this role
Remote, UK (travel required) | Permanent | Delivery | Reports to the Chief Services Officer Own how Colibri delivers for its clients, and help shape how we scale Colibri Digital is looking for a Head of Engagement Management. This is a Senior Leadership Team role. You will lead our Engagement Managers, carry accountability for a delivery portfolio worth in the tens of millions, and sit in the room where commitments to clients get made rather than inheriting them afterwards. You will also build something. Engagement management here is not only an internal function to be run well. We intend to develop it into a defined service offering with its own governance, metrics and revenue, including where AI genuinely improves how delivery gets managed rather than just where it demos well. That work is yours to shape, and it is the reason this job is more interesting than the title suggests. Why this role is worth a conversation Delivery has an equal voice, not a seat in the corridor. You are on the SLT, and you are engaged in the sales cycle to assure feasibility before we commit to a client, not to rescue the engagement afterwards. If you have spent years being handed an undeliverable scope and asked to make it work, this is the role where you get to stop that happening. You get to productise, not just police. Most delivery leadership jobs are about enforcing a framework somebody else designed. This one is about designing it, proving it, and then taking it to market as an offering. Few consultancies of our size are serious about that. We are. The scale is real but the layers are not. A large and varied client and project portfolio, and a growing team of 5 Engagement Managers today. That is enough scale for the job to matter and few enough layers that a decision you make lands in weeks rather than being socialised for a quarter. If you are coming from a large integrator, be clear-eyed about the trade: less institutional machinery, considerably more room to act. What you’ll own Champion the Culture. This role sits at the heart of every project and every sales deal, championing a culture of trust, transparency, innovation and growth is paramount The engagement portfolio. Overall delivery health across scope, timeline, budget and quality. Risks surfaced and dealt with before they become escalations The commercials of delivery. Revenue, margin and utilisation. The commercial soundness and deliverability of proposals, bids and statements of work Senior client relationships. Trusted adviser to our key clients, and the senior escalation point when something goes wrong The delivery framework. Methods, standards, governance, tooling and metrics, applied consistently rather than aspirationally The engagement management offering. Project, delivery and product management developed into services we can define, price and sell The team. Recruit, develop and keep good Engagement Managers, and build the career paths that make them want to stay What success looks like We would rather tell you now than surprise you at your first review. In year one: Engagements delivered to scope, time, budget and quality, with client satisfaction high enough that clients advocate for us Utilisation optimised without starving innovation or development time, and margin protected across the engagement lifecycle A delivery framework, toolset and metric set that are demonstrably better than the ones you inherited. Specifically, building on the AI and Tech accelerators already being used. At least one engagement management service offering defined and taken to market The team grown profitably, with capability built rather than contracted in A measurable contribution to renewal and extension revenue with existing clients You’ll have led delivery at senior level in a technology consultancy, professional services organisation, cloud/data partner or systems integrator. You’re comfortable leading a Practice and directly delivering on clients where necessary. We’re particularly interested in evidence that you have: Owned a portfolio of complex client engagements, rather than only a single programme or account, primarily within Professional Services. Assured delivery quality across a portfolio Had ownership of a P&L or practice budget, with a track record of improving performance Built and managed senior client relationships including navigating challenging delivery situations and executive level escalations Line leadership of a delivery team, including hiring, developing and retaining people Commercial fluency. You can price work, defend scope, and hold a margin conversation with a client rather than absorbing the problem internally Strong project and programme management expertise, Agile, PMI or PRINCE2 Enough technical literacy to work credibly with Data, AI, Cloud and Software engineering teams, while knowing where your own technical expertise ends A data led approach to delivery, and the confidence to bring transparency. This includes uncomfortable information in front of executive audience We are interested in people from mid-size consultancies, from cloud and data partner businesses, or from larger integrators. What you’ve owned and the impact you’ve had matters more to us than the logo on your CV. Your ability to build internal relationships and bridges will be critical to your success.