About Us

We're a truly international company, fourth largest in our industry and operating across 119 markets. An inclusive, innovative global FMCG business supported by 26,000 employees. As we embrace a new era of growth, we are transforming. Our ways of working and culture are driven by a challenger mindset, constantly questioning the status quo where people can bring their best selves to work. Our agility and collaboration are driving our ambitions, innovation and success all supported by our award-winning development programmes that creates exciting and rewarding career opportunities for all.

As we move forward, our consumers will be at the heart of what we do, evolving to needs and expectations and committing to a more meaningful contribution to harm reduction by building a successful NGP business. Integral to our long-term success is our sustainability strategy, behaving responsibly and supporting our ambitions, all underpinned by high governance.

Encouraging inclusion at local levels and supporting a developing and robust diversity agenda globally, we’re fully committed to creating and maintaining an environment that celebrates and respects difference.

The Role

This role sits within the Project Management pillar of Imperial’s central Innovation function. Reporting to the Innovation Project Manager, this role will have global remit and will support the end-to-end project management for innovation projects within the pipeline. Working closely with the Category Project Leads, Innovation Project Managers will manage multiple innovation projects concurrently, enabling and ensuring Project Management Practice is applied consistently throughout the Ideation to Launch Process, to ensure the successful delivery of strategically important Product Innovation Initiatives.

Additional Information

The Imperial Brands business is going through a major transformation, with a new CEO setting an ambitious and exciting vision for the future.  One major change is the creation of a new Global Consumer Office (GCO) – a central function which covers Innovation, Insight, Marketing and Portfolio Management and Imperial’s next-generation propositions (NGP).

The Innovation function forms a critical part of this GCO structure. The department will be organised around key innovation capabilities, with one Innovation team delivering across all categories (Combustibles, EVP, HTP and OND). The role of Innovation will be to enable Imperial to deliver consumer-centric, commercially viable innovations that are aligned with the business strategy. Innovation will achieve this through:

• Delivering R&D activities: End-to-end technical design and delivery of innovation products and packs, leveraging both in-house capabilities and external parties to facilitate the launch of category-led, consumer-centric innovations into market.
• Developing partnerships: The Innovation function will collaborate closely with Procurement to build strong relationships with partners and third parties to underpin a lean and agile delivery model that enables speed to market.
• Facilitating development of the innovation funnel: Guide Imperial to make the right business decisions about innovation projects through identifying future technical solutions and supporting cross-category generation, qualification and prioritisation of solution opportunity areas based on consumer, competitor and market insights.

Stewardship of the innovation pipeline and process: The Innovation function oversees Imperial’s innovation process, from Ideation to Launch. The Process and Governance pillar of the Innovation function owns this enterprise-wide process and drives continuous improvement to ensure more efficient and effective delivery of innovation. The team will also manage the portfolio of projects through the stage gates, ensure adherence to the relevant branches of the process and run the governance forums to ensure timely, insight-led decision making and OTIF delivery.

Principle Accountabilities

• Supporting the Innovation Project Manager with the tasks and initiatives that are part of the Innovation Program for specific Category.
• Supporting other Innovation Project Managers on specific projects or representing during leave
• Lead the end-to-end project delivery of innovation initiatives, working closely with Category Project Leads
• Create and maintain the end-to-end project / programme plan, including highlighting the critical path and ensuring any variances that impact upon it are communicated to the Project Lead
• Create and maintain of all project / programme level documentation (budget, risk & issues, resource, change, action etc.), including highlighting any material variances from plan to Project Lead
• Ensure all required input is gathered and collated from project/programme team to enable creation of project reports.
• Coordinate, facilitate and document (if required) E2E project planning workshop.
• Coordinate, facilitate and document (if required) stage gate project team meetings to gather required input for stage gate forum.
• Coordinate, facilitate and document (if required) weekly stand-up meetings with delivery leads.
• Coordinate, facilitate and document ad hoc project meetings as required (risk management, lessons learnt etc.)
• Liaise closely with Project Lead(s) to ensure all project planning and reporting is understood and accurate, and any risks and/or issues are highlighted.
• Actively identify, mitigate, and escalate (as appropriate) any key risks associated with Innovation pipeline projects.
• Identify recommendations resulting from analysis and reporting of the of the innovation portfolio vs. business objectives.
• Work closely with Category Project Leads to ensure project lessons learnt are captured and fed into the appropriate feedback loop following project closure.

Education, Key Skills & Experience

Education

• Educated to degree level in relevant field.
• Professional Project Management Qualification (e.g. Prince 2, PMP)
• Project & Programme Management
• Collaboration
• Stakeholder management
• Product development
• Commercial awareness
• Strategic planning
• Budget management

Skills

• Process management Experience
• Project managing innovation or product development projects in a tobacco environment.
• Project managing innovation or product development projects in a pharmaceutical environment.

Experience

• Project managing innovation or product development projects in an FMCG environment.
• Working with project management tools
• Effectively planning, managing and reporting on complex innovation projects
• Building strong collaborative and influential relationships with a range of stakeholders
• Monitoring and managing a portfolio of innovation projects
• Effectively managing and escalating risks in innovation projects

What We Offer:

Competitive salary, bonus scheme, pension, and 25 days holiday (with an additional 4 days on top to cover the Christmas period, and bank holidays), flexible working policy, corporate discounts, Health Cash Plan, and other wellbeing initiatives.

Imperial Brands is committed to inclusiveness and creating a work environment where differences are expected, accepted, and valued and people feel like they belong. We embrace diversity in our workforce, as part of this, there are four employee resource groups focused on Gender, Disability, LGBTQ+, and Ethnicity which any employee can join.

If you’re a person with a disability or have a condition that you believe may affect your performance during our selection process, we are more than happy to make reasonable adjustments for you during our application and interview process to enable you to be present your best self.

Please click here resourcing@uk.imptob.com to let us know if we can provide support in helping you complete an application and/or attend an interview. Don’t talk yourself out of applying

Next Steps:

Interested applicants are encouraged to apply, highlighting their suitability for the above role.

Everyone Belongs

Everyone belongs in Imperial. We are proud of being a truly inclusive organisation.

We encourage and welcome applications from people of all ages, genders, ethnicities, nationalities, disabilities, sexual orientation, religions, or beliefs and of neuro divergence. We give fair and equal consideration to all our applicants.

We welcome talented people with stories to tell, who can bring fresh thinking, new ideas and different experiences to our business and believe in enabling every person to succeed; to deliver their best performance and realise their full potential.

We understand that these are the things that make you ‘you’ and if you join us, we’ll support you in being able and confident to share your whole self with us.  

We look forward to hearing from you!