Strategic Forecasting Specialist in London

Role Overview

Team: Fulfil POD

Salary banding: £38,000 - £43,000

Experience: Mid-level

Working pattern: Full-Time

Reporting to: Forecasting Manager

Sponsorship: Unfortunately we are unable to offer sponsorship for this role.

This role in 3 words: Insightful, involved, collaborative

Top 3 qualities for this role: Inquisitive, communicator, problem solver

In the words of the team, you should leave your current role for this one because: “If you always wanted to be part of a team that supports the whole company to understand direction, quantify expectation and inform strategy whilst being able to explore your own curiosity to enable great service and value for customers - this is the place to come!”

Where you’ll work: Depending on the needs of your business area, we expect hub based people to be in the office at least once a week, and to go to OVO Connection events in-person. You’ll be assigned to the closest one of our three hub offices, Bristol, Glasgow, or London; unless your role requires field-based work. Each hub has accessible spaces to park your laptop, is designed to inspire people, help them connect and bring big ideas to life.

Everyone belongs at OVO. At OVO, we are on a mission to solve one of humanity's biggest challenges, the climate crisis. And we know it takes all of us to change the world. That’s why we need diverse people from all gender identities, ethnicities, ages, sexual orientations, life experiences and backgrounds to join us.

Teamworking for the planet: Everything we do here spins around Plan Zero. So, naturally, the team you’ll be joining plays a gigantic role in making that happen. Here’s how: The Forecasting and Strategic Planning Team exists to crystalise the dreams, ambitions and capabilities of OVO’s Fulfillment Pod and Operations into clear, well defined, forecasts, plans and targets. This enables OVO to steer a course through very complex challenges.

OVO’s Fulfillment Pod and Operation works on a demand led structure where we ensure there is a field based workforce, of correctly skilled engineers, to deliver the capacity needed to satisfy numerous energy metering worktypes from Smart meter Installations, meter maintenance through to Electric Vehicle charge point installations.

This role in a nutshell: We are looking for a highly skilled and experienced forecaster to join our dynamic Fulfil Pod, where you will join a team of experienced forecasters and analysts. This meaningful role offers an exciting opportunity to work on strategically vital deployment forecasts, playing a pivotal role as part of the deployment teams and feeding these into the wider demand forecasts across Fulfillment and the Fulfillment POD.

As our Strategic Forecasting Specialist, you will play an integral role within Fulfillment, helping senior leaders and Agile POD teams understand opportunities, challenges and risks of key strategic deployments. This role will also look ahead to wider future requirements and opportunities across Fulfillment supporting scoping in a fast paced and fluid environment.

Your key outputs will be:

• Creation and maintenance of specific forecasts for key strategic deployments, bringing them to life and helping us understand the risks, opportunities and interdependencies.
• Play an active role in POD teams and working groups to support delivery of POD goals.
• Partnering with teams across Fulfillment and Commercial to ensure alignment of data, forecasting assumptions and understanding of business processes.
• Improve communication flows between Fulfillment, Care, Asset Management and wider teams to optimise customer experience and cost where gaps exist in planning functions in the operations verticals.
• Establish business priorities, identify and communicate risks and create mitigation and milestone plans in collaboration with stakeholders.
• Develop and continuously improve key end-to-end planning performance indicators.
• Partner with forecasters on demand and capacity planning mechanisms, e.g. creation of a workflow to keep engineers optimally productive and balancing waste of underutilisation with over demand to mitigate capacity risks.
• Clearly communicate dependencies and manage/track exceptions.
• Opportunity to develop and support maintaining and developing our Anaplan forecast models alongside forecasting model builders.
• Contribute to your development and the teams’ technical skills by demonstrating inclusive behaviours and establishing a culture of highest performing teams.

You’ll be a successful Forecasting Analyst at OVO if you:

• Enjoy being in amongst the action - getting involved with working groups and PODs, really getting under the skin of any strategic development and being a knowledge leader to support deployments.
• Are comfortable in the world of telling the story of forecasts and plans at a senior leadership level - effectively constructing narratives based on modelled forecasts to effectively communicate insights and recommendations to senior leadership.
• Are passionate about creating accurate forecasts - using insightful data to drive realistic modelling assumptions to deliver real world expectations with the ability to create scenarios and answer “what if…” questions.
• Love solving complex modelling problems and making a difference through collaboration.
• Bringing the right skills together to perform analytical deep dives on business issues to identify drivers and trends, extract insight from data and clearly explain their meaning.
• Applying the appropriate tools and methods to reach the best outcome and deliver the highest value impact for our customers and business.
• Are keen to develop your own skills and ways of working. We want to help enhance your skills whilst working here, and you’ll have time to do this. We embrace mentoring/coaching and there are ample opportunities for peer to peer and self led learning.
• Have mastery of the key technical skills - demonstrating high skill level and experience using Google Sheets/Excel to create complex forecasting models with a healthy appetite to learn new technical skills.
• Have a real positive attitude and is easily able to connect and interact with people, working in a truly dynamic and exciting team, with a “roll-up your sleeves” approach.
• Have a genuine passion for problem solving and persistence when vital, getting job satisfaction from delivering outputs under time constraints and where priorities change regularly.
• Possess the ability to drive execution with strong attention to details, while keeping focus on the big picture; able to connect the dots across multiple pieces of work.
• Are comfortable challenging old ways of doing things and constantly finding better ways of working more efficiently and effectively within your team.
• Are able to thrive in a fast paced environment with strong analytics capability/business acumen with ability to understand and interpret information from multiple sources.
• Have excellent presentation, communication and interpersonal skills, with a strong ability to build effective relationships at different levels of the organisation.
• Comfortable clear communication of headline messages supported by detailed analysis.
• Possess excellent listening skills that enable you to grasp business needs and shape a shared vision for a solution that reflects the pace and quality required.
• Have experience building models in / using Anaplan with hands-on experience of multi-dimensional modelling, forecasting tools, business intelligence or analytics techniques/methodologies/tools with plenty of opportunity to develop in these areas.

You won’t like this role if you:

• Aren’t comfortable with ambiguity and fast pace change.
• Are not open to new ways of working, adapting and merging of multiple methodologies.
• Are not constantly thinking about ways to improve or challenge the status quo.
• Are not passionate about contributing to our fight towards zero carbon living.
• Are not able to work in a cross-functional team to understand a problem and get consensus on what needs to be done.

Let’s talk about what’s in it for you: We’ll pay you between £38,000 - £43,000 depending on your specific skills and experience. If your expectations are a little different, have a chat with us! We keep our pay ranges broad on purpose to give us, and you, flexibility to match your experience to our zero carbon mission. You’ll be eligible for an on-target bonus of 15%. We have one OVO bonus plan that focuses on the collective performance of our people to deliver our Plan Zero goal.

We also offer plenty of green benefits and progressive policies to help you feel like you belong at OVO…and there’s flex pay. It’s an extra 9% of your salary on top of your core pay to use as you like. You can take it as cash, add to your pension, or choose to spend it on a huge range of flex benefits.

Here’s a taster of what’s on offer:

• For starters, you’ll get 34 days of holiday (including bank holidays).
• For your health: With benefits like a healthcare cash plan or private medical insurance depending on your career level, critical illness cover, life assurance, health assessments, and more.
• For your wellbeing: With gym membership, gadget, travel and cyber insurance, workplace ISA, will writing services, DNA testing, dental insurance, and more.
• For your lifestyle: With extra holiday buying, discount dining, culture cards, tech loans, and supporting your favourite charities with give-as-you-earn donations.
• For your home: Get up to £300 off any OVO Energy plan (when you pay by Direct Debit), plus personal carbon offsetting and great discounts on smart thermostats and EV chargers.
• For your commute: Nab a great deal on ultra-low emission car leasing, plus our cycle to work scheme and public transport season ticket loans.

Want to hear about our full range of flexible benefits and progressive people policies? Our People Team can tell you everything you need to know.

For your Belonging: To find better ways to support our people, we need to listen to each other’s experiences and find ways to build a truly inclusive and diverse workplace. As part of this, we have 8 Belonging Networks at OVO. Led by our people, for our people - so when you join OVO, you can play a part - big or small - with any of the Networks. It’s up to you.