Our purpose

Our purpose is to give everyone real confidence to put their money to work. With a heritage dating back more than 175 years, we have a long history of innovation in savings and investments, combining asset management and insurance expertise to offer a wide range of solutions.

Our two distinct operating segments, Asset Management and Life, work together to provide access to balanced, long-term investment and savings solutions.

Through telling it like it is, owning it now, and moving it forward together with care and integrity; we are creating an exceptional place to work for exceptional talent.

We will consider flexible working arrangements for any of our roles and also offer workplace accommodations to ensure you have what you need to effectively deliver in your role.

Scheduling & Real-Time Optimisation Manager

M&G Life in its current form was created in October 2024 with the merger of what was formerly the closed book operation and the M&G Wealth Business (open book). M&G Life now covers over 5 million customers with more than £300 Bn invested across all of its products and wrappers and has an ambitious growth plan for 2026 and beyond. M&G Life operations work with a number of partners including Equiniti, Diligenta, Waystone, Paragon, Willis Towers Watson, as well as M&G Global Services supporting our in-house operation. M&G Life also has international presence with teams in Ireland and Poland, using a mix of insourcing and outsourcing service operations to sell to domestic and international markets.

The role will lead and deliver a high‑performing Real‑Time and Short‑Medium Term Resource Planning function across Contact Centre, Complaints, Back Office, and associated support services. The role holder is accountable for ensuring resources are optimally scheduled, deployed, and adjusted in real time to meet forecast customer demand and protect service level performance.

This role sits at the critical intersection between Strategic Planning and Operations, translating forecasts into executable schedules and dynamically managing intraday performance. The role holder will provide confident operational leadership, using live data, planning insight, and professional judgement to make timely decisions that safeguard customer outcomes, cost control, and colleague experience.

This is an operational planning role requiring strong leadership presence, analytical skill, and the ability to influence under pressure.

Key Accountabilities

• Lead the monitoring of live operational performance across all channels, proactively identifying service risks and implementing tactical interventions to maintain service level adherence.
• Own intraday resource deployment, making real‑time decisions on reallocation, skill movements, overtime, and priority shifts to respond to demand volatility.
• Support operational incident management by identifying emerging risks, escalating issues early, and activating agreed playbooks and mitigation actions (e.g. IVR messaging, skilling changes, overtime deployment).
• Own the short‑term scheduling lifecycle across all services, ensuring schedules accurately reflect forecast demand, operational priorities, and agreed shrinkage targets.
• Ensure effective scheduling of all activities including breaks, lunches, training, annual leave, offline activity, and processing time.
• Proactively manage and control shrinkage through robust scheduling, tracking planned versus actual usage, and clearly articulating service impacts where thresholds are exceeded.
• Work closely with Strategic Planners to ensure alignment between forecast demand, workforce plans, and short‑term execution.
• Produce and maintain plan‑vs‑actual, SLA, and intraday performance reporting to support informed operational decision‑making.
• Where data gaps exist, define clear requirements for Data & MI teams to enable robust and sustainable reporting solutions.
• Use performance insight and lessons learned to improve scheduling accuracy, intraday responsiveness, and overall planning effectiveness.
• Act as the primary operational planning interface, building strong, collaborative, and appropriately challenging relationships with operational leaders.
• Enable fast, informed decisions through clear communication of risks, options, and impacts, particularly during periods of disruption or underperformance.
• Educate and influence stakeholders on the impact of planned activity (training, leave, system change, absence) on customer outcomes and service performance.
• Act as custodian of the Workforce Management system for scheduling and intraday activity, ensuring data accuracy, governance, and effective use.
• Collaborate with Quality and Planning teams to understand and maintain skilling requirements, acting as the single source of truth for skills matrices.