May. 2012 – May. 2014

MOTT MACDONALD GROUP

Brighton - UK

Mott MacDonald's uniquely diverse £1 billion global consultancy works across 12 core business areas. As one of the world's largest employee-owned companies with over 14,000 staff, the group have principal offices in nearly 50 countries and projects in 140.

Planning Engineer – Programme and Commercial Management Unit

Project types: energy

Directly involved in the South East Electricity Substation Alliance (SEESA). £700 million of Nationals Grid’s capital expenditure programme over a five year period, for the development, upgrade and re-enforcement of the electricity transmission network. This is an unincorporated joint venture between Mott MacDonald, Skanska and Areva.  

Planning Engineer assigned to the largest sub-electrical station in the United Kingdom. Bramford 400kV GIS substation. Will manage 20% UK total supplied power. Project with a 120 million Pounds total budget.

Responsibilities

• Facilitating the cyclical planning process
• Creating plans in compliance with the Organisation Procedures and applying best practices
• Critical path analysis and calculation of near critical path/s
• Developing plans of works related to Outage Requirements
• Developing detail schedules applying the ‘Rolling Wave’ planning technique
• Arrangement of planning meeting/workshops to roll out the agreed work breakdown structures and working methods to the various planning contributors
• Creating resource, material and plant loaded Plans
• Evaluating schedule risks and producing schedule risk analysis reports
• Carrying out reserve analysis, documenting it in the project and implementing contingency reserves where necessary
• Ensuring projects’ implementation is carried out in a co-ordinated way
• Making strategic proposals and reposts about schedules
• Being the single point of contact for all aspects of planning communication for the overall project
• Giving advice and support conducting the procurements
• Visiting sites to evaluate the project progress on the Executing Process Group activities
• Responsible for the liaison with the appropriate project stakeholders to create, update and re-baseline schedule plans that represent activities required to successfully deliver key project/scheme milestones, being aware of interface activities and inter project links as appropriate
• Monitoring and controlling the Performance Measurement Baseline
  • Controlling scope using variance analysis
  • Controlling schedules using performance reviews, variance analysis, resource levelling, what-if scenario analysis, adjusting leads and lags and schedules’ compression
  • Controlling costs employing Earned Value management method, forecasting, TCPI, performance reviews and variance analysis
  • Participating in monthly project review meetings giving outputs and key project plan indicators
  • Reporting projects performance in terms of earned value and advising on corrective action to recover deviations from plan, as appropriate
  • Creating early warnings to prevent major issues
• Giving advice and helping improving management procedures within the organisation
• Giving advice and helping build efficient scheme codes used by the organisation

Key achievements

• In Bramford 400kv GIS substation readdressed method of obtaining the DDD Site Plan and obtained a robust site schedule and submitted it within agreed deadlines for GL (Green Light) which is a control point before to start of DDD stage (detailed, design and delivery) in SEESA.
• Highlighted the inconveniences of have started Executing Process Group activities W/O a DDD plan  
• Collaborated improving the strategic work package codes’ structure that will be applied across SEESA projects
• Gave outputs to Improve the procedure to carry out ‘collaborative meetings’ across SEESA projects
• Currently working on the improvement of the procedure to developed site schedules across SEESA projects
• Created a log which will be used as blue print to improve project life cycle procedures at SEESA organisation and Mott MacDonald Group