Planning Manager

Planning Manager / London or Manchester

Hybrid working - 2 days in the office

Our client is a highly innovative and market changing tech client. The business is maturing its approach to business planning, utilising best practice to evolve from a one-off annual planning exercise into an organisation that continuously reviews and adapts against a quarterly forecasting cycle.

The Planning Manager will manage a direct and matrix managed team to drive this process and will have responsibility to develop and maintain the Business Plan cycle, ensuring robust business plans are developed, changes are controlled through the year and are reflected in revised forecasts and risks and opportunities against this plan are understood and actioned.

The Business Planning team has a pivotal and highly visible role at the centre of the organisation.

• Manage the end to end business planning process, from the setting of annual business plans, through to quarterly change control, ensuring joined up across the organisation and reporting against its performance.
• Manage within a cross-functional matrix team - including Business Planning Points of Contact within each function, Finance (FBPs and FP&A), People and Portfolio teams - throughout the planning process, to ensure plans are developed to agreed timescales and quality standards and that roles and responsibilities are understood and followed.
• Develop key relationships with Strategy, Commercial and portfolio teams to challenge Functions and Programmes to create business plans in line with the Business strategy, pipeline of new activities, business priorities and agreed planning assumptions.
• Ensure the business strategy and 5 year roadmap / key milestones flow into business plans with defined outcomes and financial profiles.
• Governance assurance role for Business Cases to ensure structure and change control and ensuring new activities are appropriately validated and are included in the quarterly forecast and business plan.
• Understand performance against plans, working with finance to ensure corrective action is included in the quarterly forecasting.
• Understand business plan drivers, performance and actions to ExCo including developing and building presentation decks / papers.
• Support implementation of technology to empower the business to better forecast and self-service performance management tools.
• Identify and drive continuous improvement initiatives across the business through identification of process deficiencies in the planning process.
• Understand Programme, Functional and Enterprise risks and how these are captured and monitored through the business planning process.
• Deputise for Head of Business Planning as required.

• Extensive experience of managing business planning processes and working in complex, matrix-management or multi-programme environments. Must thrive working on own initiative to deliver against outcomes.
• Experience in improving strategic business planning approaches, and driving planning discipline and governance.
• Highly organised, self-motivated and able to manage and prioritise multiple competing requirements.
• Excellent communication, interpersonal and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to quickly build credibility and influence with the senior leadership team, to build strong relationships across the business, and the confidence to challenge upwards.
• Excellent written, data analytics, organisational skills, and attention to detail.
• Excellent use of Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint; and knowledge of Power BI reporting tools desirable.
• Strategic thinker, with the ability to intimately understand the business, its strategy, growth and cost drivers.
• Value through insights:
  • Champions business planning & provides insights
  • Relentless focus on the fundamentals to drive control, predictability and accuracy
  • Innovative thinker, able to define & deploy repeatable business planning practices to drive efficiency and effectiveness
• Knowledge and experience of working with a variety of business planning and reporting technologies.
• Experience of designing and executing stakeholder engagement plans, including across teams, with senior leaders, and with customers or external stakeholders.

Please do get in touch for further information

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