Senior Planner

Would you like to be part of an orginisation thrying to find a solution to the world energy issues? the UKAEA is a Nuclear fusion research facility, trying to solve the challenges in Nuclear fusion.

Are you a Senior P6 Planner looking for a new challenge?

Overall Purpose:
* Responsible for developing and measuring against baselines agreed with stakeholders and senior programme staff.
* Orchestrating the development of complex project plans and resource forecasts, identifying optimisations in future work sequencing and resource management;
* Advising and influencing project managers and senior staff as a technical expert in the field of project planning, particularly with respect to specific acute project issues and a strategic look ahead;
* Responsible for leading and delivering the planning on one or more key programme areas;
* Uphold and enforce project management processes, planning procedures and protocols. Be responsible for ensuring that planning procedures and protocols are followed by all members of the team.

Accountabilities:
* Responsible for leading and delivering project planning on the largest (>£30M) programme areas at UKAEA to a format, update / forecasting frequency and overhead agreed with the customer
o Drawing on expertise and experience to shape plan structures and monitoring methods
o Autonomous ability to find solutions to planning problems, and influence project managers in developing ameliorating response plans
o Ability to effectively liaise with the project team in the field to quantify progress, identify areas of underproductivity and trends in project performance
* Excellent ability to understand and synthesize technical information into a project plan;
* To develop critical path and options analysis, influencing execution strategy formation on large programmes;
* Liaise with external parties / customers on planning matters, ensuring project compliance and timely information flow;
* Peer reviewing planning work undertaken by others in the planning and wider project team to ensure that it is of an approach that suits the project, is of a consistent standard and adheres to planning protocol as set by the PMO;
* Assist in the development of standard plan structures and protocols for different levels of plan complexity, to be used by other planning team members;
* Identify opportunities for improvement and, using expertise and knowledge, propose solutions to problems and challenges;
* Promote the right culture to encourage good project management practices.
* Implementation of best practice project management processes, particularly with respect to planning and resource management within an engineering environment;
* Provide strategy input to project and programme managers and staff in developing activity sequences, identifying key interdependencies and optimisations to reduce overall time, whilst adhering to planning protocol;
* Advising and assisting project managers with the creation and implementation of work breakdown structures and work allocation;
* Creating baseline plans using a pre-agreed scope of works and monitoring the progress of projects against this baseline, alerting the PM to potential changes or deviations;
* Collecting, checking and supplying earned value data to the project manager, taking responsibility for the quality of data supplied;
* Making comparisons between baselined total costs, actual costs and calculating forecasts. Providing analysis of the data provided.
* Monitoring and enforcing change control with respect to the plan;
* Collate actual durations for completed tasks to inform the planning of similar future tasks;
* To design reports to suit the needs of the Authority, senior managers and project managers and to provide these reports when required;
* Communicating with a wide range of staff including design engineers, drawing staff, procurement staff and technicians to plan and monitor projects;

Additional Duties (if required)
* Lead the design and support the implementation of a Performance Measurement Baseline across major projects and programmes, working alongside technical, project management and project controls personnel
* Support with schedule risk analysis (if trained on PRA)

Specific qualifications/experience
* An in-depth experience in the implementation and thorough execution of project management processes and project planning in the context of large and complex projects;
* An approachable person with excellent inter-personal skills able to seamlessly interact with people in all corners of the project
* Ability to skilfully engage with people at all levels of the project to efficiently glean productivity information and identify trends
* A good understanding of technical control processes;
* Highly experienced in the use of Primavera with a working knowledge of Microsoft planning software;
* Project management qualification preferred;
* Degree or equivalent in engineering, physical sciences or related subject.

Rullion celebrates and supports diversity and is committed to ensuring equal opportunities for both employees and applicants