Key Responsibilities:
Integrated Planning & Scheduling
- Develop and maintain integrated master schedules for projects/programmes, ensuring clear milestones, dependencies, handoffs and acceptance criteria.
- Establish and protect credible baselines (scope, time, cost, benefits), operating disciplined change control and configuration management.
- Build and maintain the critical path and near-critical paths; lead impact assessments for slippage, scope changes and re-prioritisation.
Forecasting, Scenario & Capacity Management
- Produce time-phased forecasts, options and scenarios (what-if analysis) to inform decisions and unblock delivery.
- Work with resource managers to align capacity and demand, tracking utilisation and skills constraints across internal teams and suppliers.
- Support cost and benefits profiling with finance/benefits leads to ensure coherence between plans, budgets and value realisation.
RAID & Assurance Integration
- Integrate planning with RAID management, ensuring risks/issues and assumptions are reflected in schedules and mitigations are time-bound and owned.
- Prepare for and respond to assurance (e.g., internal reviews, Gateway/IPA Gate readiness), evidencing schedule credibility and control effectiveness.
Governance, Reporting & MI
- Provide high quality planning insight for Programme Boards and senior stakeholders, including schedule health, slippage drivers, trend analysis and recovery options.
- Define and maintain planning standards, calendars, data dictionaries and reporting cadences; ensure a single source of truth for delivery data.
- Produce RAG assessments and KPIs (e.g., milestone adherence, baseline variance, schedule performance) with clear narrative and actions.
Methods, Tools & Continuous Improvement
- Tailor planning methods across Agile, Waterfall and Hybrid delivery to suit work types (policy, digital, estates, commercial, operations).
- Own and optimise the planning toolchain (e.g., Project for the Web/MS Project/Planisware; Jira/Azure DevOps; Power BI), driving data quality and automation.
- Coach teams in planning discipline and best practice, uplifting capability and maturity across the programme/portfolio.
Stakeholder & Supplier Collaboration
- Work credibly with senior leaders, SROs, delivery managers, PMO, commercial and suppliers to co-create realistic, owned plans.
- Challenge constructively where plans lack realism; provide evidence-based recommendations and recovery strategies.
Essential Skills & Experience
- Substantial UK government experience in a similar planning role within a complex programme/project environment of significant scale, engaging multiple stakeholders and suppliers.
- Visible leadership and influence in a multi-disciplinary setting.
- Proven delivery at pace, with a track record of creating and maintaining credible baselines and driving timely decisions.
- Confidence to challenge and influence senior leaders, using clear evidence, scenarios and trade-off analysis.
- Problem ownership: Ability to identify schedule risks early, design practical recovery plans and deliver positive outcomes.
- Role-model planning and delivery practice, coaching others to improve scheduling, dependency and change control disciplines.
- Excellent written and verbal communication, producing clear board papers, dashboards and analytical commentary with strong attention to detail.
- Hands-on expertise with planning methodologies and tools, capable of flexing methods (Agile/Waterfall/Hybrid) to delivery priorities.
- Willing and able to travel regularly across departmental and supplier sites
