The Role: 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 2025 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 design, lead and embed a high performing planning function spanning contact centre, complaints and back office operations, including support services. The role holder will deliver end-to-end workforce planning through to tactical scheduling and real time management. They will ensure that service delivery is optimised against customer demand, regulatory obligations, a large transformation agenda and cost efficiency. This is not just a technical planning role though – it requires a visible, energetic leader who can inspire, coach and stretch a team of planning professionals, driving standards and balancing workloads whilst shaping the future direction of planning across M&G Life operations. They will also be responsible for conducting planning oversight of our Third Party suppliers to ensure they are resourced correctly to meet customer demand. Finally, the role holder will also be responsible for building out the requirements from a system and data perspective to optimise the functions, and reviewing opportunities to use generative AI to improve forecasting and reduce repetitive efforts from the team, instead enabling them to focus on improving planning inputs and customer and business outcomes.

Main Responsibilities:

• Strategic planning. Own and run the long-term resource planning cycle, interlocked with HR and Finance, including the generation and maintenance of capacity planning models across the long term planning horizon.

• Tactical Planning. Own and run the tactical planning and scheduling process for contact centre, complaints and back office including supporting services, to optimise resource allocation in the short-term and underpin service delivery, productivity and cost targets.

• Real time planning & allocation. Own and run the “on-the-day” function to manage adherence, respond to unplanned events and ensure delivery of the tactical plans. Ensure governance, escalation and decision-making frameworks and playbooks are robust, understood and implemented.

• Leadership & people management. Lead and develop a team of planners, forecasters and analysts, setting clear goals and targets, and provide coaching and support. This will include balancing workloads, ensuring succession planning/no single points of failure and creating a planning centre of excellence that is the engine room of the M&G Life operation.

• Communications and stakeholder management. Ensure clarity of communication upwards and sideways across Operations and across Finance, Transformation and HR to ensure clarity of baselines, risks and opportunities across operational domains.

• Governance & Continuous improvement. Manage a governance cycle that links long-term strategy, short-term planning and real time iteration and improvement. Champion the right systems, processes and data collection that underpins the planning cycle and explore and exploit new technologies and opportunities to improve planning.

• Third Party Oversight. Ensure that where we have outsourced our customer service administration to third party suppliers, the correct planning oversight governance is in place to safeguard service delivery and manage associated risks.

Key Knowledge, Skills & Experience

• Must have: Track record of team leadership and coaching, managing and developing high performance teams and succession management

• Must have: Proven experience in workforce planning across contact centres, back office and complaints in a highly regulated environment

• Must have: Strong understanding of forecasting and planning principles and the ability to build from scratch as well as optimise existing processes

• Must have: A deep understanding of customer service and an ability to drive improvements within an operation

• Must have: An ability to prioritise effectively in a complex environment and ensure appropriate management of deadlines and competing priorities

• Should have: Experience of senior stakeholder management third party partners as well as across the internal business

• Should have: Experience of working with outsourcers in an operational environment

• Should have: Strong knowledge of service performance and other customer KPIs and the inherent links between them and planning outcomes

• Should have: Experience of resource modelling, planning and forecasting

• Should have: Analytical and problem-solving skills, an ability to extract insight from patterns and ability to translate this into insight to drive actions

• Should have: An understanding of insurance products and the FS industry

• Should have: A good understanding of the industry standard technical solutions for workforce management across operational domains (Voice/contact, back office etc)

Work Level : Manager/Expert

Recruiter: Amy Curtis

Location: Homebased UK, London, Stirling

Closing Date : 15 October 2025