The team at The Open University were highly commended for how they raised their profile through the pandemic, introducing new ideas like Skype Walkers or  personal emergency time off. They kept focus on delivering student registrations, which reached record levels this year. Myriad scenarios were modelled for changes in opening hours, contact channels and cross-training in both front and back office work. 
 

Tim Milburn, manager at Emovis, left single handed during furlough, took the opportunity to greatly develop the way planning operates, with work on holiday requests, shift reviews seeing rising engagement scores and great feedback from staff. 

Gavin Rogerson, Planning Manager at Home Group, took the initiative even before Covid was declared a pandemic to review the company BCP. This meant they were ready to move to home working and his team were key in making this happen. A focus on the digital offering has cut incoming calls and fortnightly one-to-ones were introduced, rather than monthly, to keep a focus on wellbeing. 

At Legal & General, an agile, cross-skilled tactical planning team have built confidence and trust, as a centre of expertise that has already grown from 4 to 10 internal clients. This year, MI automation has been a focus, to create capacity and agility, while further deepening their knowledge of each operational area.
 

Phil Timney at RSA has implemented automation and process enhancements, greatly improving the team’s output and influence. He was described as ‘Mr Puzzle’ for seeing problems and bringing others on the journey to resolve them.

At FIS (the global financial payment giant), they have created a risk thermostat that clients can adjust, by generating a score not a binary decision, cutting fraud and saving costs.

The planners at Severn Trent Water work in geographically separated teams, looking to establish best practice planning discipline, data and processes. They have consolidated 44 different local working practices for in-day planning, alarm handling and jeopardy management, in this field engineering operation, dramatically reducing the number of outstanding jobs.