Senior Business Operations Manager

Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council

Salary: Grade 11

Location: Dudley, West Midlands

Contract: Full-time | Permanent

Dudley Council is seeking an experienced and highly capable operational leader to join our Corporate Business Operations & Support function at an important point in the Council’s improvement journey. This is a key management role responsible for turning strategic direction into effective day-to-day delivery. Working directly to the Business Operations & Corporate Support Lead, you will oversee a broad range of high-profile corporate support activity, including executive and senior leadership support, member and mayoral support, statutory information requests, corporate governance activity and wider business operations.

You will play a central role in ensuring the function is professional, responsive and resilient, with the ability to flex resources around changing organisational priorities and demand.

As Senior Business Operations Manager, you will:

• Deputise for the Business Operations & Corporate Support Lead, providing operational leadership and continuity across the function.
• Lead the day-to-day coordination of executive and senior leadership support, ensuring meetings, briefings, papers, actions and follow-up activity are managed accurately and to required timescales.
• Oversee member and mayoral support arrangements, ensuring consistently high standards of professional, confidential and politically impartial support.
• Manage and coordinate statutory information activity, including Freedom of Information, Environmental Information Regulations and Subject Access requests, ensuring effective allocation, monitoring and compliance with statutory timescales.
• Coordinate key corporate governance and business activity, including forward plans, decision and action logs, risk and issue registers, audit trails and records management.
• Manage workloads and deploy resources flexibly across teams in response to changing priorities, peaks in demand and service pressures.
• Monitor service performance, demand, workloads and quality, producing management information and insight to support assurance, planning and decision-making.
• Support the development and continuous improvement of operating models, processes, systems and ways of working, identifying opportunities to simplify activity and improve the customer experience.
• Champion the effective use of digital technology, data and automation to improve productivity, workflow management and the quality of management information.
• Build effective relationships with senior leaders, elected members, corporate services and operational teams, promoting a collaborative One Council approach.

We are seeking an experienced operational manager with:

• Significant experience of leading or managing business operations, corporate support or a similarly complex professional service.
• A strong track record of managing multiple competing priorities, often in high-profile, sensitive and time-critical environments.
• Experience of managing and developing teams, balancing workloads and flexing resources to maintain service resilience.
• Strong knowledge of corporate governance, business administration, information management and organisational processes.
• Experience of working with senior leaders, elected members or other high-profile stakeholders in a politically sensitive environment.
• A good understanding of statutory information requirements, governance, compliance and assurance.
• Strong analytical and organisational skills, with the ability to use performance information to improve service delivery and support decision-making.
• A demonstrable commitment to continuous improvement, digital enablement and creating efficient,…