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Workload Planning Manager

Employer
OPEN UNIVERSITY
Location
Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire
Salary
£34,304 to £37,467
Closing date
1 Dec 2021

Job Details

This role is responsible for the allocation of staff across Design, Development & Production, ensuring efficient utilisation of staff and delivery of projects to agreed timescales. The role works closely with Production Managers, Senior Project Managers, Project Managers and media production staff (including Editors, Artists/Designers and Software Developers) to plan and monitor allocations to projects, while ensuring future plans can be delivered.

This is a collaborative and consultative process in which the Workload Planning Manager is the key decision maker.

Key Responsibilities

• To allocate staff appropriately across all Design, Development & Production projects, working collaboratively with Senior Project Managers, Project Managers, Production Managers and production staff so that all projects can be delivered successfully.

• To monitor project progress and staff workloads with Project Managers and Senior Project Managers, incorporating project slippage in timelines and agreeing new schedules to enable projects to be completed to schedule and budget.

• To ensure efficient utilisation of production staff, monitoring and communicating under- or over-allocation of staff.

• To monitor and forecast future capacity requirements.

• To collaborate with Production Managers to ensure that sufficient appropriately skilled production staff are in place to meet current and future project requirements, liaising with freelance staff as required.

• To monitor, identify and communicate demand and planning risks to Project Managers, Senior Project Managers and Production Managers, and propose and agree resolutions.

• To identify conflicts between schedules and capacity across projects, communicating and resolving conflicts with Project Managers, Senior Project Managers and Production Managers where necessary.

• To deliver regular reports on capacity and planning risks.

• To be a key contributor to the development of efficient workload planning workflows and processes.

• To be informed of and call upon external trends and developments to enhance and maintain professional expertise and contribute to (and facilitate) continuous improvement.

• To contribute to unit strategy formulation and implementation. Skills and experience

Essential:

• Proven track record of workflow management, capacity planning, and estimating and scheduling.

• Experience of using common software tools (e.g. MS Office).

• Experience of working in a media production environment.

• Communication: communicates confidently and assertively with a variety of audiences; negotiates effectively; appropriately manages conflict.

• Initiative and problem-solving: uses initiative to identify and solve problems proactively; uses good judgement to refer issues upwards as necessary; identifies and manages risk effectively.

• Planning and Organising: plans, schedules, prioritises and allocates work effectively, often with incomplete information; delivers to multiple competing deadlines.

• Team work: is respectful and polite towards others, builds productive working relationships; works collaboratively across organisational boundaries towards common goals.

• Working under pressure: remains effective and positive even when under pressure.

• Ability to learn; understands and adapts to new ways of working; is willing and able to engage with, and digest, new tools/software, information, specialisms and ways of working.

• Continuous improvement: identifies opportunities for continuous improvement; shows commitment to own professional development; demonstrates enthusiasm, willingness and ability to learn new skills.

Desirable: • Experience of project management.

• Experience of using computer-based resource/workload management tools, such as Tempus or Hydra.

Company

The Open University (OU) is the largest academic institution in the UK and a world leader in flexible distance learning. Since it began in 1969, the OU has taught more than 1.8 million students and has almost 180,000 current students, including more than 15,000 overseas.
 
The OU was given an overall satisfaction rating of 90% in the latest National Student Survey, making it one of only three Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to consistently score 90% or above every year since 2007. Over 70% of students are in full-time or part-time employment, and four out of five FTSE 100 companies have sponsored staff to take OU courses.
 
In the latest assessment exercise for university research (Research Excellence Framework), nearly three quarters (72%) of The Open University’s research was assessed as 4 or 3 star – the highest ratings available – and awarded to research that is world-leading or internationally excellent.  The Open University is unique among UK universities having both an access mission and demonstrating research excellence.
 
The OU has a 41 year partnership with the BBC and has moved from late-night lectures in the 1970s to co-producing prime-time series such as Frozen Planet, The Bottom Line, Britain’s Great War, I Bought a Rainforest and Business Boomers. In 2013/14 OU co-productions were viewed by 220m people in the UK which prompted more than 600k visits the OU’s free learning website, OpenLearn. (http://www.open.edu/openlearn/).
 
Regarded as Britain’s major e-learning institution, the OU is a world leader in developing technology to increase access to education on a global scale. Its vast ‘open content portfolio’ includes free study units on OpenLearn, which received 5.2million unique visitors in 2012/13, and materials on iTunes U, which has recorded more than 66 million downloads.
 

Company info
Telephone
+(44)01908 274066
Location
WALTON HALL
MILTON KEYNES
BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom

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