Head of Forecasting and Planning, OVO
£110-130k
+ 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
More information about location
2+ days a week in office
Powering human progress with clean affordable energy for everyone
Open for applications
Powering human progress with clean affordable energy for everyone
1001+ employees
Open for applications
£110-130k
+ 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
More information about location
2+ days a week in office
1001+ employees
Company mission
We're on a mission to lower carbon emissions to zero by 2035, helping our customers reduce theirs at the same time - we call this Plan Zero.
Role
Who you are
- Have an ambitious spirit, you'll need to be proactive, and someone who is always up for a challenge
- Have proven leadership in workforce planning, forecasting, and operational strategy within a large-scale, complex environment
- Exceptional stakeholder management—able to influence senior leaders, break down silos, and embed planning into broader business strategy
- Are an excellent communicator. Your communication skills give you the ability to convey your ideas effectively, tailoring the communication to audiences at all levels of the organisation
- Have experience collaborating and influencing multiple partners, gaining alignment and sign-off. Are seen as a thought leader, you can lead without direct control
- Have strong technical and analytical skills with the ability to define, create and use performance metrics to measure performance and understand opportunities within your journey
- Can understand how to link performance to tangible financial opportunities, you’re commercially creative with evidence of high financial acumen
- Have significant experience of managing complex processes in a high risk / regulated environment. Preferably Energy sector knowledge
- A coaching-first leadership approach—able to develop, inspire, and elevate a high-performing team
- Strong expertise in predictive modeling and data-driven forecasting—comfortable driving innovation in this space
- Love being close to the customer- you’ll thrive in researching and understanding customer jobs, turning these into ideas, prototypes and then customer solutions
- A track record of delivering operational efficiencies and supporting large-scale transformation
- Have a sound understanding of resource planning tools and techniques, WFM and forecasting systems & planning solutions
What the job involves
- We’re looking for a strategic, people focused, experienced planning professional to lead our Forecasting, Planning and Readiness team
- This leader will oversee our FP&C team, responsible for ensuring we have the right people in the right place at the right time—supporting a 5,000+ FTE business across Contact Centres, Complaints, Sales, Back Office, and linking in with our Field Operations
- You will be responsible for long-term workforce planning (up to 5 years), operational efficiency, and fostering a world-class planning team
- Your team is positioned as part of the ‘Brain’ of the Operation making sure that supply and demand is matched across all of our channels from years out to in the day, owning Live Operations and incident management
- You will have to strike a balance between driving cost efficiencies, achieving best in class customer service and supporting various business and people outcomes
- The ideal candidate will be a coach-first person who creates a culture of trust, autonomy, and shared responsibility
- You’ll empower your team to make smart, data-driven decisions while embedding predictive modeling and forward-thinking intelligence into the way we work
- You will be the central connection point across departments, ensuring our planning and forecasting align with business needs, smooth demand, and support operational transformation
- You’ll lead a cross-functional team of 70+ people across the UK and India working as part of the wider Customer Enablement team alongside areas such as Quality Intelligence, Performance & MI and our Systems Configurations teams
- You'll often be found building relationships, analysing data and showcasing the operational performance of the business
- Lead long-range forecasting team working up to 5 years out across multiple channels, geographies and disciplines - managing an annual operational budget of +100m
- Ensure operational efficiencies and change are delivered effectively into the business working with key change owners and your business readiness team
- Owning our monthly lock cycles ensuring changes in supply or demand are captured and locked into budgets
- Support overall estate design working with our People / Finance / Operations teams deliver an effective resourcing strategy across our operation
- Creating supply labour strategies to meet demand across both internal and outsourced partner (South Africa, India, UK) to underpin effective delivery against customer demand profiles
- Participate in customer segmentation determining how we effectively route, segment and identify key customers types and deliver a best in class customer experience
- Broker trade offs between operational functions to determine the best use of our FTE budget to deliver against key operational KPIs
- Ensure our scheduled teams receive, manage and deliver against effective schedules
- Oversee our Live Operations function responsible for in day performance and change, ensuring queues are correctly staffed, and that incidents are managed effectively
- People & Leadership
- Leads a team of c. 70 subject matter experts across the Forecasting, Planning & Readiness specialism who will help bring the strategy and plans to life
- Act as the primary strategic partner for senior leaders across Operations, Finance, Field Force, and Change, ensuring planning and transformation efforts are fully aligned
- Foster a culture where the team feels empowered, trusted, and able to take ownership of their work—balancing autonomy with accountability
- Coach the team to make the complex simple - preparing concise updates from complex data sets, outlining options and mitigation, whilst articulating drivers to any variances to plan
- Technology
- Ensure our Workforce Optimisation tool set is fit for purpose and optimised to deliver technology enabled business decision making
- Drive a shift towards forward-thinking, data science-led forecasting—focusing on predictive modeling rather than reactive planning across c. 15 millions customer interactions per year
- Reporting to: Director of Customer Enablement
Salary benchmarks
Our take
On average, home energy represents 26% of our carbon footprint. Ovo Energy wants to bring this to zero by providing cheaper, greener and simpler energy to customers. They are analysing meter data to deliver easy, personalised actions, turning electric vehicles into power stations with clever chargers, and building energy-efficient heaters. For households, their offering is organised into four different energy plans. that include interest rewards on energy credit balance.
In 2020, OVO completed the acquisition of SSE Energy Services' retail arm for £500 million, meaning that the challenger brand now has around 4 million customers in the UK.
While helping Ovo members halve their carbon footprints, the company is also working towards becoming a net zero carbon business by 2035. The challenges ahead for the company include encouraging consumer behaviour change, shifting towards subscription models for home energy use.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
Company
Employee endorsements
Inspiring mission
"The mission to provide Green energy to all customers, and to enable all our customers to start on a journey towards zero carbon living is written in..."
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Jul 2023
$265.8m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Feb 2019
$265.8m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Total funding: $572.7m
Company benefits
- Annual Discretionary Bonus
- 9% Flex Pay - extra on top of your core pay to use as you like. You can take it as cash, use as your pension contribution, or choose to spend it on a huge range of flex benefits (tech schemes, EV leasing and more!).
- Flexible / Remote Working
- Personal Development Allowances and Free Access to OVOLearn - our very own training platform
- 34 Days Holiday (including bank holidays)
- Health Insurance
- £400 OVO Energy Discount
Company values
- Find a better way - We always look for a better way, whether that’s by delivering a better service, employing brilliant people or improving our products and processes
- Do what's right - Being open, honest and fair is one of the values which applies to everything we do. We take pride in talking to our customers and delivering exceptional work
- Build something great - Simple solutions aren’t quick or easy to find. They take time and tenacity. Our people work to find an answer that helps us ‘build something great’
Company HQ
Redcliffe, Bristol, UK
Leadership
David Buttress
(CEO)CEO of OVO, the UK’s 3rd largest energy supplier. Joined in May 2024.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at OVO
Alessandro Storer (Head of Inclusion & Belonging )
- We run inclusive training and unconscious bias workshops for employees and interviewers
- We provide mental health support, through different networks, having mental health first aiders within the business and running initiatives like our "wellbeing Wednesdays" to promote this.
- We have dedicated Early Years programmes with a focus on underrepresented groups, offering different training opportunities within the business.
- We invest in tools, like Textio, and focused I&D job boards to help us reduce bias in our job postings and recruitment activity.
- Commitment in improving diversity across our Tech Teams and working with companies to improve the tech ecosystem as a whole, specifically have committed to 25% Women in Tech at OVO by 2025
- We've signed up to numerous charters, like the Tech Talent Charter, Race at Work Charter and Trans in the City, to show our continuing commitment to improving I&D within OVO and the wider community
- Within OVO we have multiple belonging networks and communities set up, to offer support and forums for everybody
- Read more about our commitments to improving Diversity & Inclusion at OVO in our linked belonging report
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