Jun. 2012 – Present ATOMIC WEAPONS ESTABLISHMENT (AWE)
Head of Planning
Programme and Project Controls – Aldermaston, Reading
Initially I was engaged by the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) as Lead Planner to work within the central Project Controls team with a remit to focus on three key areas – Process and Procedure, the migration of Primavera v5 to Primavera P6 v8.2 and the policing of planning standards throughout the directorate and applying industry best practice, technical audit and leading the Project Scheduling interrogation during Integrated Baseline Reviews (IBR). However; I was invited to interview for the role of Acting Head of Planning for the directorate following the previous incumbent becoming the Head of project Controls. This saw the focus of my role fundamentally shift to becoming the substantive Functional Head, with budgetary control, of a department with responsibility and technical leadership and authority for 100+ Planning personnel as hierarchically direct reports embedded into Project Delivery Teams. During this time the business was about to implement a major reorganisation from a Directorate to a Functional lead model and my primary role was to support this business transformation initiative by designing and strategizing an organisational structure that is fit for purpose in both modes that details the interaction with the delivery teams and promotes best practice and adds value. This included the required Job Descriptions, capability assessment criteria and business cases. Furthermore I had ownership for the benchmarking of planning personnel so that they could be re-aligned to the new Job Descriptions according to peer-group assessed competence. The recruitment, retention and allocation to delivery teams of planning personnel according to business need and priority formed another strand of my day-to-day duties in addition to the duties I had as Lead Planner, not counting the forming of on-going policy with my fellow Heads of Function – which saw me having a pretty full working life – given the requisite stakeholder engagement and politics that come with such a high-profile role that is tier three to the Managing Director of a c10,000 employee business. The project footprint for which I had responsibility covered Research and Development, Engineering, Technology, Systems, Construction (under NEC3), Facility Refit, Decommissioning, Transition, Information Services, Site Maintenance and Transport and Logistics – in short all areas of this unique business. Delivery monitoring, governance and performance metric establishment (These were many and varied ranging from Base Cost and Estimate comparisons against baseline (as well as risk, contingency escalation, programme and corporate contingencies and reserve) and reviewing Risk and Issues impacts on current schedule performance.) formed an additional strand to this diverse role which saw me quantifying how performance was to be measured on priority programmes and defining KPIs which were used to brief the Managing Director at the Visual Management Board sessions – in addition to chasing down progress and managing interdependencies and associated relationships with internal and client stakeholders.