Head of Planning, Performance & Delivery
About The Role
As Head of Planning, Performance & Delivery, you will provide organisation wide leadership to bring together strategic planning, performance insight, sustainability integration, and cross Academy delivery into a coherent operating rhythm. Acting as a strategic integrator, you will strengthen alignment across directorates, reduce organisational noise, and improve confidence in decision making and delivery.
This is a highly visible role working closely with the Executive Leadership Team (ELT), Directors, and product leads. You’ll help modernise planning practices, improve organisational insight, and support major change initiatives across the Academy.
What you will lead
- Delivery of integrated annual and quarterly planning cycles aligned to Strategy 2030.
- Development of a unified organisational scorecard and Executive ready dashboards across people, finance, sustainability, digital, and delivery performance.
- Quarterly Business Reviews with strategic suppliers to strengthen performance, value, and risk management.
- Light touch oversight of major cross Academy initiatives, ensuring clearer prioritisation, benefits tracking, and organisational sequencing.
- Support for digital, operational, and sustainability related transformation across directorates.
- Growth of data insight capability to improve forecasting, analytics, and data driven decision making.
You will bring significant experience of planning, performance, insight, or transformation within a complex organisation. You’ll be confident working with Executive level leaders and skilled at shaping alignment across diverse teams.
We’re Looking For Someone Who Is
- A strategic thinker who sees the whole organisational picture
- Insight driven, analytical, and comfortable working with complex information
- An influential communicator with strong senior stakeholder engagement skills
- Experienced in leading or supporting organisational change
- Collaborative, resilient, and able to bring clarity in fast paced environments
- Comfortable with digital and data enabled ways of working (Power BI experience is helpful)
- Experience working with strategic suppliers, sustainability insights, or digital transformation would be an advantage
Interview date: w/c 20/04/2026
Interview location: London
Our location
Our light, spacious head office is based in a fantastic location in central London with views over St James’s Park and close to the West End. We operate hybrid, flexible working practices with a baseline for office based working of a mandatory weekly team day plus further days each week as required for the role and the Academy.
Who are we?
Engineering matters. It shapes our everyday lives, from our ability to turn the lights on, have a hot shower and commute into work, to the mobile phones we rely on to keep connected. It also plays a vital role in addressing some of the biggest challenges facing society today, from climate change, to global health pandemics and cyber threats.
The Royal Academy of Engineering is a charity that harnesses the power of engineering to build a sustainable society and an inclusive economy that works for everyone. In collaboration with our Fellows and partners, we’re growing talent and developing skills for the future, driving innovation, and building global partnerships, and influencing policy and engaging the public. Together we’re working to tackle the greatest challenges of our age.
With a diverse workforce and an inclusive and supportive culture, we look to attract candidates from wide and different backgrounds who have a passion for the role engineering plays in society. Our aim is to make the Academy the best place to work for the staff we have and those we seek to attract.
Why work for us?
We’re looking for people who are driven to make the world a better place. If you’re passionate about what you do and want to work collaboratively with talented colleagues to make change happen now and for future generations, we want you to get in touch.
This is the perfect time to join us. We have a dynamic, visionary CEO, a strong leadership team and an ambitious and exciting strategy. The value we bring as experts in our field and change agents is highly recognised and makes the Academy a motivating place to be. Our work today builds on a long, proud history with a focused and ambitious future which we’d love you to be part of.
We are looking for talented people who want to make a difference, to join our team – is this you?
The Academy is committed to making reasonable adjustments to remove barriers that hinder applicants from applying or staff from working effectively and comfortably.