PLANNING & REPORTING LEAD (Planned & Reactive Maintenance)
Permanent - Reading (2days/week in office)
We are looking for someone from a physical infrastructure (rather than IT) / asset-intensive industry background- i..e rail , highways, water, utilities etc. Who can develop insight across:
- Planned and reactive maintenance
- Incident volumes and resolution
- Access management
- Supplier delivery performance
- Cost and budget tracking
As the Planning & Reporting Lead, you’ll own the planning cadence and performance analytics backbone that enables teams across Operational Services to deliver safely, efficiently, and predictably.
You’ll ensure the right work is planned at the right time and cost, build trusted reporting that validates performance, and use insight to drive continuous improvement—reducing reactive maintenance work, optimising supplier performance, and improving outcomes for customers and shareholders alike.
Why this role matters
Without strong planning and performance insight, delivery drifts, suppliers misalign, and reactive work increases. This role ensures everyone operates from a single version of the truth, enabling better decisions, stronger governance, and sustained service improvement. You’ll play a pivotal role in upholding JV principles, protecting customer experience, and transforming how operational performance is planned, measured, and improved.
What you’ll be here to do:
You’ll be both strategist and practitioner—building the systems and insight that keep operations aligned, accountable, and continuously improving. You’ll:
Planning & Performance Cadence
- Own the annual and quarterly planning rhythm, ensuring adherence to maintenance plans and schedules.
- Provide early warning of divergence from plan, highlighting delivery risks that could impact cost, performance, or asset risk.
- Develop predictive analytics and trend-based forecasting to support proactive decision making.
Data, Reporting & MI Backbone
- Build and maintain the performance MI framework for Operational Services.
- Design dashboards, automate data flows, enforce data quality and version control, and maintain a trusted metric library.
- Ensure reporting is clear, consistent, and credible across multiple suppliers and stakeholders.
Analytics & Operational Insight
- Collate and analyse data from corporate systems to track real-time operations and reactive maintenance volumes.
- Use insight to inform preventative and corrective maintenance strategies, enabling smarter clustering, aligned demand/capacity/budget, and coordinated outage windows.
- Quantify benefits such as avoided truck rolls, cycle optimisation, and efficiency gains.
SLA Governance & Supplier Interlocks
- Implement transparent SLA validation logic and mitigation rules.
- Resolve disputed measures and ensure fair, evidence-based attribution across suppliers.
- Track underperformance and escalate clearly into governance forums for improvement planning.
Budget, Risk & Continuous Improvement
- Track budget variance, efficiency opportunities, and compliance.
- Share insight with Infrastructure teams to shape short, medium, and long-term asset strategies.
- Drive a culture of “better every day,” using data to challenge the status quo and optimise quality, cost, and performance.
Who we’re looking for:
You’ll be a senior performance, analytics, or planning leader who enjoys influencing outcomes through insight rather than authority. You’ll have:
- Strong understanding of operational/maintenance delivery within an asset-heavy industry (rail, utilities, highways etc)
- Proven experience in performance MI, analytics, and SLA frameworks.
- Expertise in automating data flows and enforcing data quality.
- Advanced capability in Power BI or Tableau, plus Excel/PowerQuery.
- Extensive experience in supplier management and managed service environments.
- Strong senior-level communication—you’re comfortable presenting insight that drives action.
If you also have the following, we’re especially interested in talking to you:
- ITIL qualification.
- Data or project management background.
- SQL capability.
- Up-to-date knowledge of OSS / Network Management tools.