Manager, Project Management Controls

About the role

This position provides management, guidance, and oversight of the resources delivering project controls services, with a focus on financial and scheduling support, project metrics, and reporting for large-scale, high-value infrastructure improvement programs. These include natural gas pipeline replacement projects and other infrastructure upgrades. The role works closely with project and program managers to ensure business objectives are achieved, such as regulatory approval of programs, prudent and accurately tracked spending, on-time and on-budget project delivery, commissioning of assets, and fulfillment of regulatory and governmental commitments.

This highly analytical role is responsible for compiling, analyzing, interpreting, and presenting complex information, with particular emphasis on program financials. It requires adherence to the Company’s Asset Development Process (ADP), as well as the development and enforcement of supporting processes to ensure projects are properly planned, estimated, scheduled, tracked, reported, and records managed. The role also includes the selection and oversight of internal and outsourced project controls team members.

Responsibilities

• Provides oversight of the Project Controls Cost Analysts and Schedulers assigned to medium- and large-scale programs and projects.
• Supports execution of the Company’s Asset Development Process (ADP), a gated project delivery process, along with Supply Chain policies and other corporate or departmental best practices.
• Ensures accurate preparation of annual capital budgets, quarterly reforecasts, and monthly financial reporting, variance analysis, and explanations.
• Creates monthly financial reports and visual presentations of financial data for review by project management and executive leadership.
• Ensures accurate preparation of ad-hoc financial reports and analysis; reviews and analyzes trends and variances; provides explanations of variances; researches expenditures; develops financial comparisons and forecasts.
• Supports regulatory filings, commitments, requests, and reporting.
• Supports financial system upgrade initiatives.
• Develops, documents, and enforces procedures that enable effective financial, document, schedule, and scope controls for assigned programs and projects.
• Assists in determining appropriate staffing levels for project controls services and participates in the selection of internal and outsourced resources.
• Coordinates and oversees overall controls activities while providing hands-on support and serving as the primary project controls liaison to the project management team.
• Compiles project cost estimates and ensures they are accurate, complete, and aligned with the Company’s Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).
• Ensures Project Funding Requests are created, reviewed, and approved.
• Defines and implements cost control procedures for material procurement and contract work, including requisition review and approval, purchase order structure, pay application development, invoice approval processes, and mapping invoice payments to account codes.
• Prepares and submits monthly accruals and monitors invoice payment activity to support timely processing.
• Develops and maintains comprehensive program forecasts, including costs to date (CTD) and estimates to complete (ETC), by WBS and by month. Forecasts support annual budgets, quarterly reforecasts, project scorecards, and other reporting needs.
• Reconciles project financials monthly across applicable tools to maintain one reliable source of financial truth, including Oracle Financials and project or program financial tracking tools.
• Conducts variance analysis to identify and communicate variances from plan, trends, risks, opportunities, and impacts to cost, schedule, and revenue.
• Supports the change management process to ensure changes are properly reviewed, vetted, analyzed for impact, and incorporated into revised scope, schedule, and financial controls.
• Defines and implements project and program document repositories, provides training to project team members, and monitors compliance.
• Develops and maintains master schedules used for project execution, in-service forecasting, and cost recovery or revenue planning; conducts scenario analysis as needed.
• Assists in compiling, analyzing, and quantifying project risks, and ensures project schedules and forecasts appropriately account for risk allowances and contingencies.
• Conducts in-service analysis to support fixed asset and tax accounting and to forecast earnings; partners with Project Support and Plant Accounting as assets are ready to be placed into service.
• Ensures closeout activities are completed at the end of each project, including final documentation, purchase order closeout, project funding closeout, and related requirements.
• Ensures lessons learned are captured and incorporated into process improvement initiatives.
• Provides project information and analytics to support internal audits, commission audits, and other compliance or reporting needs.
• Creates project-related presentations and reports, including dashboards, scorecards, gate review materials, and other executive-ready communications.

Requirements

• BA, BS, or BBA in Engineering, Construction Project Management, Finance, Accounting, Business Management, or a related field.
• 6+ years of experience in project controls, cost controls, financial reporting, or a related role supporting large engineering and construction projects, preferably in gas distribution or a related energy field.

Qualifications

• Certification through the Project Management Institute (PMI), Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering (AACE), or a similar recognized organization (preferred).
• 5+ years of experience leading teams, managing others, and/or managing resource vendor/service contracts (preferred).
• 5+ years of experience in project management, project controls, project estimating, scheduling, risk analysis, finance, accounting, or a related position.
• Experience in the energy sector, particularly natural gas, pipelines, natural gas storage, or process plant development (preferred).

Skills

• Advanced proficiency in Microsoft Office, especially Excel.
• Advanced proficiency in project cost controls concepts.
• Intermediate proficiency in project management concepts.
• Intermediate proficiency in project scheduling concepts.
• Intermediate proficiency in accounting concepts.
• Ability to communicate effectively with all levels of the organization.
• Ability to oversee multiple projects and resources while adapting to changing priorities.
• Ability to identify, develop, and deploy project controls processes and standards.
• Ability to produce advanced Project Controls deliverables, including earned value analysis, financial analysis, and related reporting.
• Working knowledge of the Asset Development Process (ADP) or another stage-gate project management methodology (preferred).
• Proficiency with SharePoint or another web-based data repository (preferred).
• Experience with Microsoft Project, Primavera P6, or another scheduling tool (preferred).
• Proficiency with Oracle ERP (preferred).
• Experience with Unifier project management solution (preferred).
• Experience with commercial project management and project controls software tools (preferred).

Working Conditions

• Primarily office-based work environment.
• Occasional travel required.

Benefits

Southern Company invests in the well-being of its employees and their families through a comprehensive total rewards strategy that includes competitive base salary, annual incentive awards for eligible employees, and health, welfare, and retirement benefits designed to support physical, financial, and emotional/social well-being. This position may also be eligible for additional compensation, such as an incentive program. A summary of the benefits offered can be found here.