About the job

Job summary

Accelerated Capability Environment (ACE) is a government-led innovation partnership working with business and academia on behalf of and with government departments on a wide array of challenges.  ACE is a multidisciplinary team comprised of civil servants, contractors, companies and academics that can draw upon a broad array of expertise to deliver outcomes.

You will lead a multidisciplinary team delivering on a wide range of innovation commissions for government departments.  Promote, develop and deliver leading edge capabilities and exploitation across government missions collaborating with other delivery teams in the innovation ecosystem.  Drive a culture of mission-led innovation through partnerships to mitigate threats and exploit opportunities in order to tackle challenging problems across government. 

It will help missions shape their understanding of their mission problems, maximising their impact advocating the use of hackathons, impact labs, proof of concepts via agile delivery sprints and identifying and deploying new tools to advance problem shaping and early discovery work via industry and academia. 

In partnership with the CEO of our commercial delivery partner the Head will ensure the Vivace (business) community is optimised in terms of the skills set required to meet leading edge technology challenges covering the government’s five critical technologies (Artificial Intelligence, Engineering Biology, Future Telecommunications, Semiconductors and Quantum Technologies). 

Advocate innovation by design in all forums, support risk taking and support mission teams with the ACE ways of working. Principally focussed on policing and security but also working across government, build innovation networks and connect them with missions.

 ACE Annual Review 2022-23 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

Job description

Key responsibilities include: 

• Leading and further develop the high performing team.  
• Working together with the CEO of Vivace and the ACE senior leadership team to maximise the impact of the ACE community.  Encourage risk taking and creativity and constructive challenge.
• Representing ACE across government providing insight and strategic leadership on innovation.  Developing cross cutting strategies to promote leading edge technology, identifying and articulating opportunities to deploy innovative solutions via ACE.
• Promoting the ACE platform and its mission by engaging with Senior Officials, networking with stakeholders inside and outside of government to secure a stable pipeline of commissions for ACE. 
• Championing sustainable innovation and agile delivery which is enabled by a coherent commercial and innovation strategy across collaborating organisations whilst promoting inclusivity.
• Being accountable to the Senior Risk Owner of ACE in Homeland Security Group.
• Owning the business plan, organisation, culture, ways of working and setting overall strategic direction aligning with the Home Office Science & Technology and AI strategies.
• Ensuring the Private Sector Partner is delivering against the commercial agreement. 

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

The successful candidate will need to demonstrate their knowledge, experience, capability and behavioural approach to a high standard against the following key criteria: 

• Experience of being an inspiring, confident and empowering leader, who can set strategic direction, lead effectively through ambiguity, scrutiny and pressure and get the best out of a diverse workforce through promoting an inclusive, high-performance culture.
• Building and managing strategic relationships and partnerships with an ability to win the confidence and buy in of a wide range of internal and external senior stakeholders, including identifying and resolving conflicts and tensions where these arise.
• Delivery of complex, cross-government challenges, drawing upon system leadership and promoting collaboration across boundaries to impact organisational culture and performance.
• Excellent communication skills and an ability to translate complex and ambiguous issues for a range of audiences and coaching others to do the same. They will be comfortable working with commercial suppliers who deliver outcomes for multiple mission owners with differing requirements, cultures and risk appetites.
• Strong analytical skills with an ability to bring insight into key problems. 
• Comfortable leading on technology focussed innovation.

Desirable Criteria:

• Experience of working with commercial suppliers to deliver outcomes for multiple mission owners with differing requirements, cultures and risk appetites.
• Experience in procurement, contract management, project leadership, technology design and implementation and user-centred design is beneficial. Ability to act as an intelligent client internally with the commercial contractor is helpful.

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £75,000, Home Office contributes £20,250 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

Things you need to know

Selection process details

Please follow the Job Advert instructions on the Civil Service Jobs website to apply online, no later than 23:55hrs on Wednesday 20th March 2024. 

Provide some basic personal information;

1. A CV - setting out your career history, highlighting specific responsibilities and achievements that are relevant for this role, including details where budgets and numbers of people managed, relevant achievements in recent posts, together with reasons for any gaps within the last two years;
2. A Statement of Suitability – (limited to 1250 words) explaining how you consider your personal skills, qualities and experience, provide evidence of your suitability for the role, with particular reference to the essential criteria in the person specification. 
3. Diversity Monitoring - as part of the online application process, you will be asked a number of diversity-related questions. If you do not wish to provide a declaration on any of the characteristics, you will have the option to select 'prefer not to say'. See the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy: 2022 to 2025 (HTML) - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) for more information.

It is essential that in your written application you give evidence, using examples, of proven experience. These responses will be developed and discussed with candidates invited for interview. Failure to submit both a CV and Supporting Statement will mean the panel only have limited information on which to assess your application against the criteria in the person specification.

Security

Successful candidates must meet the security requirements before they can be appointed. The level of security needed is developed vetting (opens in a new window).

See our vetting charter (opens in a new window). People working with government assets must complete baseline personnel security standard (opens in new window) checks.

Nationality requirements

Open to UK nationals only.

Working for the Civil Service

The Civil Service Code (opens in a new window) sets out the standards of behaviour expected of civil servants.

We recruit by merit on the basis of fair and open competition, as outlined in the Civil Service Commission's recruitment principles (opens in a new window). The Civil Service embraces diversity and promotes equal opportunities. As such, we run a Disability Confident Scheme (DCS) for candidates with disabilities who meet the minimum selection criteria. The Civil Service also offers a Redeployment Interview Scheme to civil servants who are at risk of redundancy, and who meet the minimum requirements for the advertised vacancy.