Operations Consultant (International Social Impact Organisation)

About the Role

About Us: 

Pay As You Go COO Pay As You Go COO brings together the best of fractional leadership and consulting in a way that’s truly fit for smaller businesses. 

With decades of experience in high-growth companies, we combine hands-on operating experience with structured, project-based delivery that’s focused, practical, and built for modern startups. We work with founders, leadership teams, and individuals navigating complex strategic and operational decisions. Whether they need hands-on support to prepare for investment or clear strategic planning to reach their next revenue milestone, we’re here to help our clients make big leaps at every key inflection point. 

We provide practical strategy, finance, and operations support - from shaping new ventures and bringing structure to messy work, to building the operational and financial clarity needed for sustainable growth, strong governance and long-term organisational impact. 

About the Client 

Our client is a globally connected social impact organisation operating across multiple jurisdictions and focused on research, leadership development, systems change and long-term societal impact. 

Following a significant organisational transition and the establishment of a new UK charitable entity, the organisation is entering its next stage of development. The team is growing and strengthening its internal operational capability, with a permanent COO also due to join the organisation. 

The challenge now is less about temporarily adding operational capacity and more about establishing a simple, effective operating system that connects organisational strategy to day-to-day execution, gives the team clarity over priorities and ownership, and establishes the management rhythms required to keep delivery on track. 

About the Role: Operating System Implementation 

We’re looking for an experienced Operator to take the lead on implementing and embedding this operating system across the organisation. 

This is not a solo mission, nor is it a traditional consultancy project. 

You’ll work closely with the Pay As You Go COO leadership team and the client’s existing leadership and operations teams. Pay As You Go COO will lead an initial Discovery & Strategy process to define the organisation’s core problem statement, objectives, Key Results and priority projects. Your role will be to help turn that strategic framework into the way the organisation actually works. 

You’ll establish Asana as the central system for managing organisational delivery, translate priorities into clear projects and ownership, support adoption across the team and help establish the associated management and reporting cadence. 

While you bring strong operational judgement, delivery capability and organisational skills, you will be supported by, and expected to utilise, Pay As You Go COO’s operating frameworks and project delivery structures. 

Key Responsibilities:

1. Participate in the initial Discovery & Strategy process alongside Pay As You Go COO and client leadership.

2. Translate agreed organisational objectives and Key Results into prioritised projects, milestones, ownership and actions.

3. Build and maintain the organisation’s delivery system within Asana.

4. Work directly with project owners to establish clear delivery plans and accountability.

5. Support team onboarding and adoption of Asana as the central source of truth for delivery.

6. Establish practical management and reporting rhythms that connect back to organisational objectives and KRs.

7. Help leadership identify delivery risks, dependencies, bottlenecks and areas requiring intervention.

8. Continuously refine the operating system as the team begins using it.

9. Ensure the system is simple, practical and proportionate to the organisation.

10. Work closely with Pay As You Go COO to ensure implementation remains aligned with the agreed strategic framework.

11. Help embed a sustainable system that can ultimately be owned and evolved by the organisation and its incoming COO 

About You 

Mission-driven operator: You are comfortable operating within organisations where impact, purpose and stakeholder relationships matter alongside operational effectiveness. You are excited by helping organisations build the systems required to increase their long-term impact. 

Collaborative builder: You enjoy working within an established framework rather than reinventing the wheel and understand how to balance autonomy with collaboration. You build trust quickly, communicate clearly and enjoy working closely with founders, leadership teams and diverse stakeholders. 

Operational generalist: You have experience across operations, project delivery, organisational systems and ways of working, and are comfortable moving between strategy and execution. You are equally happy participating in a leadership discussion, configuring Asana, helping someone structure a project or following up on actions to ensure delivery happens. 

Strategy-to-execution mindset: You understand how to translate high-level organisational priorities into objectives, Key Results, projects, ownership and practical day-to-day delivery. 

Startup / scale-up fluency: You understand how to work in environments where priorities evolve quickly, resources are constrained and structure is still emerging. You are comfortable bringing order to complexity and balancing pragmatism with rigour. Experience working with charities, foundations, social enterprises or other mission-driven organisations would be advantageous. 

Strong project and programme manager: You are highly organised, able to coordinate multiple workstreams simultaneously and comfortable driving projects forward through influence rather than hierarchy. 

Asana expertise: You have strong practical experience using Asana to manage cross-functional organisational delivery. Ideally, you have implemented or significantly improved an Asana setup, rather than simply used one as an individual contributor. 

Excellent communicator: You have strong written and verbal communication skills and are comfortable facilitating meetings, documenting decisions and working with stakeholders at all levels of an organisation. 

Systems thinker: You enjoy designing and implementing ways of working that improve organisational effectiveness without creating unnecessary bureaucracy. 

Ownership mentality: You are proactive, resourceful and comfortable operating independently while remaining highly collaborative. When you spot a problem, your instinct is to solve it. You proactively identify issues, volunteer information, drive work forward without constant direction and take responsibility for outcomes. 

What You'll Be Doing

1. Joining the initial Discovery & Strategy workshop to understand the strategic context first-hand.

2. Helping translate the agreed problem statement, objectives and KRs into a practical delivery framework

3. Setting up objectives, KRs, priority projects, milestones and ownership within Asana.

4. Working with project owners to turn priorities into clear delivery plans.

5. Establishing a simple and consistent approach to project management across the organisation.

6. Onboarding and supporting team members to use Asana effectively.

7. Monitoring adoption and identifying where the system is not being used consistently.

8. Establishing leadership and project-management rhythms that reinforce delivery.

9. Helping ensure meetings result in clear decisions, actions and accountability.

10. Providing visibility over progress, risks, dependencies and bottlenecks - Iterating the system based on how it works in practice.

11. Working closely with Pay As You Go COO and client leadership throughout implementation. 

Success in this Role. 

By the end of the engagement, we would expect to see:

- A small number of clear organisational objectives and measurable Key Results 

- Priority projects explicitly linked to those objectives 

- Clear ownership and accountability across the organisation 

- Asana established as the central source of truth for organisational delivery 

- Consistent adoption of the system across the team 

- Effective management and reporting rhythms in place 

- Improved visibility of progress, risks, dependencies and bottlenecks 

- A clear connection between organisational strategy and day-to-day activity 

- Reduced reliance on individual leaders to manually coordinate delivery 

- A simple, functioning operating system that can be owned and evolved internally 

Engagement Details 

Format: Part-time, project-based engagement. We anticipate the role requiring approximately 1.5 days per week over an initial 10-week period, although there is flexibility around how those days are structured. 

Timeline: The engagement will begin with a Pay As You Go COO-led Discovery & Strategy workshop, which we would ideally like you to attend. This will be followed by a focused period of implementation and embedding alongside the client team. 

Duration: Initial 10-week engagement focused on implementing and embedding the organisation’s operating system. 

Reporting to: Founder of Pay As You Go COO. Working closely with the client leadership and operations teams on a day-to-day basis. 

Location: Remote / flexible. Occasional in-person meetings may be required, ideally in London, although this is not a strict requirement. 

Terms 

This engagement is offered at a guide rate of £600 per day (plus VAT where applicable), depending on experience and suitability for the brief. Because this is a collaborative delivery between yourself and Pay As You Go COO, the engagement is managed under our umbrella. 

Our fee structure is simple: we retain 15% of the day rate to cover project governance, senior operational oversight, mentorship, client relationship management, sourcing the engagement and access to our operating frameworks and delivery methodologies. This structure ensures the client receives a high-quality, joined-up operational engagement while providing you with ongoing support, guidance and escalation cover throughout the project. 

Next steps 

Please submit your application as soon as possible and by 23.59 on Friday 18th of September. We will review applications on a rolling basis and expect to hold initial conversations with shortlisted candidates over the coming weeks. 

This engagement is due to commence 23rd September.