Job Description

Salary range: £49,827- £52,866 p.a. inc.

Contract: Fixed term/Secondment (maternity cover until 31 December 2022)

Hours of work: 36 hours per week

Location: Civic Centre and remote working

Could you help make our data more valuable?

Brent is a tremendously vibrant London borough where the iconic arch of Wembley Stadium dominates the skyline. Spanning both inner and outer London, it is a borough of huge contrasts in terms of its economic, environmental, ethnic and social make up. Brent’s diversity is evident to all who visit our borough and our long history of ethnic and cultural diversity has created a place that is truly unique and valued by those who live and work here.

The council is pursuing a far-reaching transformation agenda that better meets the needs of our community so it is an exciting time to join us.

The Post

The Performance, Insight and Improvement team (PII) is a multi-disciplinary team of analysts and improvement specialists who work across the Community Wellbeing Department; encompassing Housing, Adult Social Care, and Public Health & Culture. The service helps operational teams to robustly monitor and improve performance and quality, to gain more sophisticated insight into the needs and experiences of our customers, and to design and deliver lasting improvements across our services. Building on the success of our first three years, the team is expanding, so this is an exciting time to join us.

This post is responsible for leading a programme of data quality projects and information systems enhancements across our Housing department.

Our data needs are constantly evolving, our operational services are becoming continually hungrier for intelligence, and as more and more services move online, our data landscape becomes increasingly complex. Our many information systems need to keep pace with this, and we need to ensure that our data is comprehensive, reliable and accessible in order to make good use of it. This post is our systems and data expert; you’ll work as part of project teams to ensure that when we review or design services, we design simple and effective IT systems that support our desired ways of working, and capture information that helps staff to do their jobs well, and gives managers visibility of performance. You will enable us to be a better client; acting as the translator between operational services, performance analysts and IT developers, and ensuring that when we invest money in improving our systems, we get the tools we really need.

Where we are being held back by poor quality data, or an inability to combine and interrogate it the way we need to, you’ll be tasked with investigating the root cause of the problem; taking time to understand how information is handled by staff and systems in exhaustive detail so that when you implement changes in data management, they address the real issue first time.

We have a range of different specialists in PII, and we firmly believe that projects achieve better outcomes if we can leverage the right mix of skills from each of them. As systems and data projects manager, you’ll lead multi-disciplinary teams of performance and improvement staff, and work in partnership with our digital transformation team, business intelligence and
IT.

The Person

The ideal candidate will have excellent data handling skills, and be comfortable manipulating, combining and interrogating large quantities of data. You’ll be tenacious and tireless in understanding what is happening with our data, uncovering problems in our systems and data flows that others may not notice. You’ll be someone who can speak both
technical and operational languages; turning operational processes in to robust specifications, and translating complex technical issues succinctly to a wide range of audiences so that the required action is always well understood.

You’ll ideally have had experience of delivering systems improvements; writing technical specifications, and working alongside developers to design and test new functionality. Previous experience of working with our key Housing databases (Northgate Housing and MS Dynamics), reporting and performance tools (Business Objects, PowerBI, Excel), and querying languages (SQL, DAX) would be an advantage but not essential.

Most importantly, you’ll be someone who is able to understand what we want to do with our data, and can help us to design and maintain a data environment that gives us visibility of performance, enables us to make evidence based decisions, and demonstrates the impact
of what we do.

Closing date: 23 January 2022 (23:00)

Additional Information

Brent Council values the diversity of its community and aims to have a workforce that reflects this and therefore encourage applications from all sections of the community. We positively encourage all applicants to self-identify their characteristics in the diversity survey section in the application.
We are committed to safer recruitment and safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children and young people and expect all staff and volunteers to share this commitment. Applicants should be aware that posts working with children, young people and vulnerable adults are subject to an Enhanced DBS check as well as other employment clearances.

Brent has a positive approach to flexible working.

As a disability confident employer Brent welcomes applications from people with all disabilities, including hidden disabilities and mental health conditions. We will interview any disabled applicant who meets the essential criteria. If you require reasonable adjustments to be made to any part of the recruitment process due to your disability, please contact us on recruitment@brent.gov.uk. Please note the information you provide will be treated fairly and confidentially.

Please note CVs will not be considered as part of your application for this position.

Job Description

Secondment application