Senior Project Planner

About the Role

DSA is seeking a Senior Project Planner to lead planning, scheduling, project controls, and progress monitoring activities for multidisciplinary projects. This full-time position is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and primarily involves review and assessment as part of site supervision services. The role may also encompass developing and maintaining project schedules, monitoring performance, coordinating with design and supervision teams, managing project risks, and providing strategic planning support across all project stages to ensure successful delivery.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop, maintain, and manage detailed project schedules covering design, authority approvals, tendering, procurement, construction supervision, and handover activities.
• Establish Work Breakdown Structures (WBS), project baselines, milestones, and critical paths.
• Prepare integrated master schedules for multidisciplinary projects, coordinating inputs from project managers, discipline leads, and consultants.
• Monitor project construction progress against approved baselines, key milestones, and submitted schedules, including planned, forecast, and actual progress.
• Review, assess, monitor, and report on submitted engineering, procurement, manpower, and equipment schedules weekly and monthly.
• Conduct critical path and schedule variance analysis to identify delays and performance concerns, evaluating progress trends and forecasting completion dates.
• Review, assess, and report on submitted recovery plans and mitigation strategies for schedule slippages.
• Monitor design deliverables, review cycles, submissions, and approval timelines, ensuring coordination with multidisciplinary teams for timely issuance and return of documentation.
• Prepare and present planning reports, schedule updates, risk assessments, and recovery plans to clients and project leadership.
• Identify schedule risks, constraints, bottlenecks, and potential delays, performing impact assessments and scenario planning.
• Support project managers in resource planning, workload forecasting, and optimal allocation of project resources.
• Prepare weekly, monthly, and ad-hoc progress reports, developing project dashboards, KPI reports, and executive summaries.

Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor's Degree in Engineering, Architecture, Construction Management, Project Management, or a related discipline.
• Professional certification such as PMP, PSP (Planning & Scheduling Professional), PRINCE2, or equivalent is preferred.
• Advanced proficiency in Primavera P6 is mandatory.
• Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Project, Excel, and project reporting tools.
• Minimum of 10 years of professional experience in project planning, scheduling, and project controls.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience within an engineering, architecture, landscape, or multidisciplinary consultancy environment.
• Proven experience on large-scale building construction projects within KSA or the GCC, with a preference for hospitality experience.
• Overall experience supporting projects through design and tender stages, and specifically through construction supervision and closeout phases.
• Experience in assisting coordination of multidisciplinary design teams and construction supervision teams.
• Specific experience in assessing and reporting on contractor-submitted Primavera P6 baseline, planned, forecast, and actual progress schedules.
• Specific experience in assessing actual construction site progress against submitted and approved Primavera P6 recovery programs.

Work Type

This is a full-time position based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.