Senior Planner, London

Mercury is the European leader in construction solutions.

We build and manage complex engineering & construction projects for the world’s leading corporations. Our solutions help deliver technologies and life changing advancements that connect people, communities, and businesses, giving them the power to achieve incredible things. Our people have the courage to be innovative. Their determination and sharp focus enable us to deliver with certainty, time and time again.

We deliver our clients’ visions through leading edge construction solutions across multiple sectors, including Enterprise Data Centres, Advanced Technology & Life Sciences, Hyperscale Data Centres, Fire Protection.

At Mercury, it is our duty to encourage and back our people to realise their vision of themselves. We place them at the heart of what we do, providing challenging opportunities to develop within a great team in a supportive environment that allows them to reach their full potential.

Key Responsibilities Of The Role

• Responsible for a project or portfolio of projects (regional / sectoral), serving as the lead planner across assigned scope, taking ownership of the full planning lifecycle, driving programme strategy, and acting as the senior planning authority for all schedule-related matters on the project or portfolio.
• Responsible for all aspects of planning, as defined by the Planning SOP, ensuring rigorous compliance with internal standards, client specifications, and contractual requirements, while also identifying opportunities to improve and refine planning processes, templates, and deliverables across the assigned projects.
• Reporting to the Planning Department on all functional matters, including schedule health, KPI trends, tool utilisation, compliance with planning standards, and providing feedback on the effectiveness of current procedures, recommending enhancements where appropriate.
• Developing and maintaining schedules for pre-construction / construction / commissioning phases using Primavera P6 (or equivalent scheduling software), taking full ownership of schedule architecture including WBS design, activity coding structures, calendar assignments, logic networks, and constraint management, ensuring schedules are robust, auditable, and reflective of the agreed construction methodology, procurement strategy, and contract programme.
• Milestone projections, delay / float path analysis, leading critical path and near-critical path analysis, multi-path float consumption monitoring, and scenario-based forecasting to provide senior management and clients with robust, evidence-based milestone confidence assessments and early warning of programme threats.
• Earned Value Management (EVM) systems – leading the implementation, calibration, and ongoing management of EVM frameworks where contractually required or adopted by the project, ensuring accurate calculation and interpretation of key metrics (CPI, SPI, EAC, ETC, TCPI), and presenting EVM outputs in a manner that supports informed commercial and programme decision-making.
• Monitoring schedule performance and productivity, establishing performance baselines and benchmarks, conducting systematic analysis of planned vs. actual progress and productivity rates, identifying adverse trends at an early stage, and driving corrective action plans through collaboration with project management and site teams.
• Auditing progress on site through structured and regular site audits, independently verifying reported progress against physical completion, challenging inconsistencies, validating measurement methods and quantities, and ensuring that the schedule remains a true and credible reflection of site reality at all times.
• Preparation of tender schedules to support the estimating and bid process, developing strategically sound, competitive, and deliverable programmes that reflect proposed methodologies, resource strategies, procurement timelines, phasing options, and contract milestones, providing programme narratives and risk commentary to strengthen bid submissions.
• Supporting and overseeing weekly workface planning systems, collaborating with site supervision, construction management, and subcontractors to develop effective short-interval plans (e.g., 1-week / 3-week / 6-week lookaheads) that translate the master schedule into actionable, crew-level work plans, and monitoring adherence to improve plan reliability and predictability.
• Resource / cash loading of schedules, applying detailed labour, plant, material, subcontract, and cost data to schedule activities, producing resource histograms, cash flow forecasts, and S-curves for internal planning, client reporting, and commercial alignment, ensuring loaded data is validated and reconciled with estimating and commercial inputs.
• All other duties associated with the role, including active contribution to continuous improvement initiatives, development and refinement of planning tools, templates, procedures, and training materials, participation in departmental strategy and governance, and support of wider organisational objectives and the advancement of the planning discipline across the business.