Head of the Strategic Projects Office

He kōrero mō mātou | About Watercare
 

Ki te ora te wai, ka ora te whenua, ka ora te tangata
When the water is healthy, the land and the people are healthy

Now is an exciting time to join Watercare, we're planning to spend $14 billion over the next 10 years to ensure we can continue to support our growing city in a climate-resilient way. When you average that out, that's an investment of $3.8 million every day!

He whakamārama mō te tūranga mahi | About the role
 

This is a rare opportunity to help shape and influence Watercare’s most critical strategic priorities at an enterprise level.
 

As the Head of Strategic Projects Office, you will lead a small, high-impact function that operates as an extension of the CEO and Executive Team. You will play a pivotal role in strengthening, accelerating and de-risking the delivery of the organisation’s most important initiatives — ensuring they are aligned to strategy, appropriately prioritised, and executed with clarity and discipline.

Working at the heart of the organisation, you will:

• Partner directly with the Executive Leadership Team to drive strategic planning and portfolio alignment

• Lead enterprise-wide prioritisation, ensuring investment decisions reflect strategic intent, risk appetite and funding constraints

• Provide independent challenge, robust decision support and clear recommendations to enable timely executive decision-making

• Surface and navigate complex trade-offs, dependencies and capacity constraints across a diverse portfolio

• Provide targeted assurance and intervention on critical or at-risk programmes

• Build and uplift enterprise delivery capability through a pragmatic, outcomes-focused approach
   

This role offers a unique combination of strategy, governance, and hands-on problem solving — ideal for a leader who thrives in complexity and wants to make a meaningful, organisation-wide impact.

Ngā pūkenga e rapu nei mātou | About you
 

You are a highly credible and commercially astute with a proven track record of leading complex strategic programmes and influencing at the highest levels of an organisation.
 

You bring:

• Significant experience in strategy, transformation or enterprise portfolio leadership role

• Demonstrated success delivering large-scale, multi-year initiatives with measurable outcomes

• Strong experience working with Executive and/or Board stakeholders, with the confidence to challenge constructively

• Advanced financial literacy, with the ability to shape and assess business cases, investment decisions and benefit realisation
   

Beyond your experience, you are:

• An enterprise thinker who can connect strategy to execution and prioritise where it matters most

• A clear and structured communicator, able to simplify complexity and enable sound decision-making

• Pragmatic and outcomes-driven, focused on delivering impact rather than process for its own sake

• Comfortable operating with ambiguity, and skilled at identifying risk and driving early intervention

• Influential and credible, with the ability to build trust quickly and lead through influence rather than formal authority

Ngā hua mōu | What's in it for you

We offer a competitive salary and staff benefits package including:
•    Training and development opportunities
•    Life and income protection insurance plans
•    Generous parental leave
•    Employee discounts at a range of large retailers

Me pēhea te tono mai | How to Apply

Come and join our team! If you are looking for an exciting career opportunity with a fantastic team then please apply online today - careers.watercare.co.nz.