Lead Planner/project Controller

Location: Cheadle, United Kingdom

Thales people provide armed forces customers with operational advantage at every decisive moment throughout the mission. Defence and armed forces customers rely on us to deliver the full range of defence mission systems solutions at land, sea, and air. Our platforms extend across the battlespace including Above and Sonar, Electronic Combat, and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance systems.

Together we offer fantastic opportunities for committed employees to learn and develop their career with us. At Thales UK, we research, develop, and supply technology and services that impact the lives of millions of people each day to make life better, and keep us safer. We innovate across five major industries; Aerospace, Defence, Ground Transportation, Security and Space. Your health and well-being matters to us and that’s why we offer you the flexibility to do what’s important to you; whether that’s part time hours, job sharing, home working, or the ability to flex your start and finish times. Where possible, we support a working pattern that suits your lifestyle and helps you reach your ambitions.

**THALES** are looking to recruit a passionate & driven **Lead Planner/Project Controller** to work within the PMO team based in **Cheadle**, working on one of Thales's Autonomous Mine Counter Measure Projects. This is a high-profile, Multinational Project working on a leading edge technology developing the future autonomous maritime mine countermeasures systems.

**What can we offer you?**
- On offer is a competitive salary and benefits package, which includes;
- Performance Related Bonus
- Half day every Friday, usually finishing around 13:00pm
- Pension Scheme
- 28 days annual leave (Plus Bank Holidays)
- Life Cover
- 24/7 Employee Assistance Program and access to mental wellbeing app
- Employee discount shopping schemes on major brands and retailers
- Gym membership discounts

**What will you deliver?**
- Project Planning Schedule Construct & Resource Profiling_
- Produce and maintain a baseline schedule to underpin the project requirements ensuring the level of detail is correct for the type and complexity of project; tasks are logically linked correctly in accordance with the design lifecycle; all technical and non-technical requirements are reflected and all internal and external dependencies are accurately captured and linked to show any schedule impact on movement of dates.
- Making use of layouts to ensure that the schedule can be easily presented and understood by the project team.
- Generate an accurate and meaningful critical path which can be communicated to the Project Team enabling issues to be reconciled and decisions made to assist in the recovery of slippage, where applicable.
- Provide assistance in the development of Work Breakdown Structures for a project or work stream which effectively reflects and communicates the project to Stakeholders.
- Create and maintaining accurate project resource profiles ensuring any overloads are easily identified for resolution.
- Implement improvement actions resulting from schedule quality reviews ensuring that schedule integrity (FUSE) scores are within recommended boundaries for project type.
- Chair and run planning workshops at both Work Package and Project levels.
- Great communication skills, with the ability to communicate with both internal and external customers.
- Proficient user of Primavera
- Good understanding of Microsoft Project
- Project Controls:_
- Contributes effectively to all gate reviews by providing relevant and reliable information. Assesses recommendations from gate reviews and instigates appropriate responses for corrective action.
- Ensures project controls and planning governance defined for own projects or sector is followed.
- Undertakes monthly comprehensive status updates on projects in accordance with the Update and Review calendar using established reporting mechanisms and processes. Provide reports of status and performance of project in a timely manner using standard project formats. Contribute and support project level reviews.
- Ensure the baseline and configuration control processes are adhered to enable an audit trail of changes to schedule and cost to be maintained. identify “baseline to current” status changes and provide this to stakeholders, demonstrating an understanding of the importance of baseline control. Routinely applies basic performance measurement techniques to validate actual progress and reasons for variance.
- Ensure the timely completion of Internal Reporting packs in line with Thales processes ensuring information is accurate and delivered in a timely manner.
- Provide resource profiles resulting from the monthly schedule update process in order to reconcile resource loading anomalies ahead of the data publish.
- Supporting both internal and external Project Reviews by providing the schedule, critical path, progress and overall health of the project.

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