Project Planner / Scheduler

Universal Destinations & Experiences (UDX), a division of Comcast NBCUniversal, is building a world class theme park and resort in Bedford, after the UK government agreed a package of support to unlock this £6.4bn inward investment. Opening in 2031, the park will become the UK's most popular visitor attraction with an estimated 8.5m visitors a year, supporting the creation of 8,000 new jobs and delivering an estimated £50b in economic benefits. Bedford Visitor Attraction Programme is the DCMS-led programme to support delivery of the park by UDX, and its supporting infrastructure, and facilitate cross-government collaboration with local authorities across the region to ensure the wider benefits are realised. You'll be joining us at an exciting time as part of an innovative and ambitious team, working hard to embed disciplined delivery and collaborative behaviours to ensure successful delivery of the different elements of the programme. As a team we're committed to supporting your professional development. As well as securing the APM Project Management Qualification, you'll be encouraged to develop your leadership skills, work with a mentor and build your professional network to support your future career progression. We currently have around 100 project delivery professionals within DCMS and around 18,000 working across Government. These colleagues work as project, programme and portfolio managers or in specialist roles such as risk and issues managers and project planners. A career in the Government Project Delivery Profession enables you to make a difference; improving our public services while building and developing your professional skills. Your career here could take you from climate change projects to building new hospitals or schools to equipping our armed forces. The variety and significance of roles is unparalleled. Our mission is to attract and retain the best individuals by providing a rewarding career, supporting continuous professional development through our robust learning offering which includes accredited and apprenticeship qualifications, and shaping our community in a way that you can all feel inspired by. For more information on the Project Delivery Profession, please see the Project Delivery Capability Framework which has been created to support the development of all project delivery professionals across government. As a Project Planner/Scheduler, you will primarily be responsible for developing, maintaining and continuously improving an integrated project delivery schedule and Integrated Delivery Plan (IDP), bringing together plans from multiple teams, delivery partners and external stakeholders into a single coherent programme view. You will be comfortable working within ambiguity, influencing stakeholders without direct authority, and translating complex information into clear, actionable plans. You will be responsible for:

• Developing and maintaining a detailed Integrated Delivery Plan covering all major workstreams, milestones, dependencies and critical paths.
• Building strong working relationships with project managers, policy leads, delivery partners, local authorities, government departments and suppliers.
• Working collaboratively with delivery partners to provide essential planning expertise to support effective decision-making, identifying delivery risks and dependencies, and ensure the programme remains on track to deliver its strategic objectives.
• Provide effective challenge to ensure delivery partner plans are realistic, robust and achievable.
• Monitor progress against agreed milestones and delivery commitments, identifying schedule risks, emerging issues and slippages, and proposing mitigation actions where appropriate.
• Producing accurate, timely and high-quality planning products, dashboards and reports for programme boards and senior stakeholders to inform programme decision-making.
• Assessing the impact of change requests on the integrated delivery schedule and critical path, and ensuring planning assumptions, constraints and dependencies are documented and regularly reviewed.
• Supporting the development of programme controls and PMO capability within DCMS PMO, drive improvements in planning processes, tools and reporting and contribute to lessons learned activities and continuous improvement initiatives.