Role Title: Project Planner
Duration: contract to run until 31/12/2026
Location: Hybrid. 1-2 days a week on client site in Hammersmith.
Rate: up to £339.02 p/d Umbrella inside IR35
Role purpose / summary
SAP S/4 Planning experience essential.
Role Purpose
- The Technical Planner plays a critical role in governing, integrating, and assuring planning activities across a complex, multi‑wave transformation programme. The role ensures planning consistency, manages interdependencies across projects, and maintains the integrity of the end‑to‑end critical path to enable successful delivery.
Key Accountabilities
Planning Governance & Standards
- Champion consistent planning practices across all workstreams, waves, towers, and deployments.
- Provide clear guidance on minimum planning standards, reporting expectations, and plan visualisation formats for different governance levels.
- Own and govern the Programme's single 'source of truth' integrated delivery plan, ensuring accuracy and version control.
- Continuously improve planning and reporting guidelines based on lessons learned and evolving delivery requirements.
Dependency & Critical Path Management
- Manage formal "air traffic control" of all programme‑wide interdependencies, ensuring full visibility and control of critical path items.
- Maintain and track key external dependencies affecting overall programme timelines.
- Assess and assure downstream dependency management across projects and programmes that influence the integrated critical path.
- Conduct critical path analysis, including progress vs. plan and risk assessments, escalating issues to delivery leadership.
Plan Quality Assurance
- Assess health, completeness, and compliance of individual wave, tower, and project plans.
- Lead weekly planning governance reviews for all critical path Microsoft Project plans (Levels 3 and 4).
- Ensure accuracy and integrity of Level 0 (Roadmap) and Level 1 (Wave) plans.
- Integrate dependencies into the end‑to‑end Level 1+ Integrated Delivery Plan.
Governance, Reporting & Stakeholder Engagement
- Provide planning, dependency, milestone, and progress insights into relevant governance forums.
- Liaise with the Transformation Governance Office, addressing planning queries and ensuring alignment with programme governance frameworks.
- Build strong, trusted relationships with senior internal stakeholders (including C‑suite and direct reports) and external vendors.
Experience & Skills Required:
Essential Experience
- Proven experience governing and managing critical interdependencies across multiple projects or programmes with shared delivery outcomes.
- Demonstrable expertise managing complex plans with internal and external portfolio dependencies.
- Strong understanding of the full end‑to‑end IT programme lifecycle, across Waterfall and Agile methodologies.
- Prior experience operating in global, fast‑paced FTSE‑250‑scale environments.
- Successful senior stakeholder engagement up to CIO level.
- Expert proficiency in Microsoft Project and enterprise planning tools such as PlanView and Jira.
- Experience creating dependency visualisations (e.g., tube maps).
Desirable Experience
- Experience supporting or remediating in‑flight programmes requiring strengthened planning discipline.
Characteristics & Behaviours
- Rapid learner able to quickly understand complex programme structures.
- Highly organised with exceptional attention to detail.
- Confident in constructively challenging stakeholders to uphold planning integrity.
- Self‑starter able to work proactively and independently.
- Comfortable handling sensitive information
All profiles will be reviewed against the required skills and experience. Due to the high number of applications we will only be able to respond to successful applicants in the first instance. We thank you for your interest and the time taken to apply!
