Plan and Manage Work
Level:
Expert / leading
Expert / leading
Delivers quality advice on time and within budget using the right mix of resources and project management methods.
- Can translate strategies, priorities and issues into policy projects with clear intent and direction of travel, scope, and level of resources.
- Takes a leadership role in the policy or programme team (including cross-agency), ensuring the right skills and experience are available when required.
- Can establish and manage clear and meaningful governance and decision-making arrangements (managing information flows effectively), reconciling them with line management accountabilities.
- Can apply ‘right touch’ project management principles to ensure desired outcomes are delivered on time and to the right level of quality, by:
- adapting the principles agilely in response to uncertainty and change
- using stakeholder management plans and risk registers appropriately
- working with stakeholders and functional groups and across related work to ensure plans are realistic, workable and joined up.
70% on-the-job learning
- Initiate and lead complex policy projects, ensuring that the rights skills are available and applied at the right time to produce desired deliverables within specified timelines.
- Look at new project management approaches and techniques that can be adapted to policy environments, and which accommodate iterative methodologies.
- Advise others on the timeframes and stages required to properly engage with Māori.
- Share people and resources to enable joint ownership and delivery of a project.
- Establish and manage governance arrangements and the flows of information in all directions.
- For complex projects, develop and maintain risk registers that identify the likely consequences of risks, strategies for mitigating them, and their likely effectiveness.
- Design stakeholder management plans that identify key stakeholders, their level of interest and influence, and how they will participate in projects.
- Work with managers to scope, develop, prioritise and adjust the work programme as necessary.
- Coach or mentor less experienced analysts in project planning and management.
- Present to colleagues on lessons learned from managing big or complex policy projects.
20% learning from others
- Seek feedback from colleagues in your own and other agencies in your sector on draft project plans, risk registers and stakeholder plans.
10% formal learning
- Consider taking an advanced project management course (e.g. Agile Policy Management, PRINCE 2).
- Consider taking a course that focuses on personal and professional effectiveness (e.g. Managing Yourself for Success by Auckland University).
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Use the Development Pathways Tool
The Development Pathways Tool can help you identify how to develop your skills (or your team’s skills) to the next level of policy practice.
Explore the tool further by selecting the skill you wish to develop and by selecting the development level you want to achieve.