Senior Associate Planning Consultant

**Do you want to work for a company whose purpose is to improve society by considering social outcomes, and to transform businesses, communities, and opportunities for its employees? Mott MacDonald is a global consultancy whose people do exactly that.**

**The Role**
Reporting to the Head of Project Controls, the role will be responsible for developing and maintaining robust control of the capital investment schedule across. This includes providing active support the project and programme team(s) in all planning and reporting activities. This role would suit a collaborative individual with great leadership and communication skills who enjoys multi-tasking, loves a busy working environment and thrives under pressure.**Key Duties/Responsibilities**
- This is a business critical role - effectively hosting our ‘single view of the truth’ for schedule across Affinity Water.

The role has the following parameters, working in tandem with our Project Control Specialists
- To ensure that capital investment programme schedule information is accurate and timely
- To establish the scope and work breakdown structure for the capital delivery schedule, including the capture of key assumptions
- To define and control the schedule baseline for our capital delivery schedule and project, programme and portfolio levels, ensuring that they incorporate learning from previous projects and is realistic / achievable. Work closely with the Project Controls Specialists to ensure that the schedule, budget and risk / contingency baselines are consistent and integrated
- Establish and maintain the framework for maintaining the schedule interdependencies between projects, programmes and portfolios
- Establish and maintain the framework for forecasting critical resources - to enable the identification and mitigation of bottlenecks
- Establish, maintain and continuously improve the framework for template schedules, schedule activity norms and standard work
- Establish, maintain and continuously improve the framework for schedule risk assessment, contingency and mitigation
- Critically review and assess all schedules, investment papers and change requests - making recommendations to our Investment Committee (including confidence on deliverability)
- To ensure that schedule progress is regularly reviewed and reported, identifying risks, issues and opportunities
- Oversee the schedules that are being reported by project and programme managers, ensuring that the underpinning schedules from our supply chain are well defined and accurately reported
- To produce and continuously improve schedule management information as part of our monthly reporting cycle
- To establish and continuously improve the planning standards, processes and procedures required to effectively control the plan
- To retain records and historic data for future reference and protection of the business
- To lead the Planning Team
- To act as business owner for the planning systems and processes
- To establish service level agreements with all internal customers for planning activities

**Required for the position of Senior Associate Planning Consultant**:

- Able to rapidly establish credibility and lead on ‘all things planning’
- High integrity
- Clear communication - able to simplify
- A strong commitment to delivery: on time, to standard, within agreed resources.
- Confident, articulate, with the ability to influence and constructively challenge.
- Excellent communication skills and able to simplify complex issues
- Experience of Earned value and Critical Path management and control
- Experience of planning in an NEC3 / 4 environment
- Expertise in drafting and presenting reports and briefings to a senior executive audience.
- Development, deployment and continuous improvement of planning processes, procedures and systems
- Attention to detail
- Successful experience of working in multiple project environment
- Team leadership
- Construction Forensic Planning experience essential
- Claims Planning experience essential

**Preferred, but not essential**:

- Experience of planning in both client and supplier environments

**Knowledge, Skills and Education Requirements**
- Expert level knowledge of Primavera and MSProject
- A proficiency in Microsoft Office Applications
- NVQ level 3 or equivalent (A-level)
- Good level of technical understanding
- Excellent written and verbal skills
- Strong planning and organising skills with demonstrated ability to manage in fine detail
- Ability to interface with all relevant levels of client organisation
- Working hours will be 37.5 hours per week Monday to Friday.

If you meet 80% or more of what we’re looking for, please still apply. We understand not everyone will meet all the requirements, but you might have skills we didn’t know we need.

**Job Profile**

**About the business unit**
The Advisory and Programme Delivery (APD) unit delivers management services in all the sectors that Mott MacDonald operate in the Built Environ