Job Description

Pre-Delivery Business Planning Lead

📍 New Plymouth, Tauranga & Wellington with remote and flexible working options available

🕐 Permanent - Full-time

Bring your structure, judgement and influence to the earliest stages of enterprise planning in this exciting opportunity. At Powerco, the quality of our delivery starts well before projects enter the pipeline. As our Pre-Delivery Business Planning Lead, you’ll play a critical role in shaping proposed initiatives before resources are committed — ensuring they are strategically aligned, commercially sound, appropriately scoped, and ready for informed investment decisions.

You’ll work closely with senior leaders, business sponsors, Finance, Enterprise Architecture, the PMO and delivery teams to turn strategic intent into clear, evidence-based initiative proposals. This role is about improving the quality of decisions before delivery begins: testing feasibility, clarifying trade-offs, identifying risks and dependencies, and recommending how initiatives should be prioritised and sequenced.

If you’re someone who can operate comfortably in ambiguity, influence across functions, and help leaders make disciplined planning and investment decisions, this is a role where you can have real enterprise impact.

What we offer you

• Positive and supportive team culture and the opportunity to thrive in a genuinely caring and fun environment
• Loads of flexibility – we embrace hybrid working
• All the usual stuff, but way better – 4% KiwiSaver, ability to buy extra leave, paid volunteer days, free fruit in the office, amazing Parental Leave entitlements, free life and medical insurance – Wow!!!

About the role

Reporting to the Head of Strategy and Business Planning, this role sits within our Strategy and Finance team and plays an important part in ensuring initiatives are ready before they move into the business plan and delivery pipeline.

You’ll lead the structured development of initiatives through the Concept and Pre-Delivery phases, ensuring proposals are strategically aligned, supported by evidence, feasible within organisational capacity, and backed by clear delivery pathways.

This is a high-impact, highly collaborative role with plenty of senior stakeholder engagement. You’ll help business owners and sponsors shape ideas into actionable initiative concepts, support prioritisation and sequencing decisions, and make sure investment decision materials are complete, consistent, and decision-ready.

In this role, you will:

• Lead the structured development of initiatives through the Concept and Pre-Delivery phases
• Translate strategic objectives into actionable initiative concepts
• Facilitate alignment between business needs, strategic priorities, and delivery feasibility
• Ensure initiatives are appropriately scoped, costed, and sequenced before entering the business plan
• Develop concept briefs, discovery outputs, and pre-delivery documentation
• Identify delivery dependencies, risks, constraints, and planning assumptions early
• Provide structured analysis to support prioritisation and sequencing across the strategic portfolio
• Maintain visibility of the emerging and rolling pipeline of initiatives
• Support investment decision readiness by ensuring scope, delivery pathways, outcomes, risks, dependencies, and resource implications are clear
• Coordinate the transition from planning into programme or project delivery structures
• Embed consistent planning practices and strengthen enterprise planning capability across Powerco

To be a success in this role, you will need

• Experience in strategic planning, programme development, investment planning, business case development, or a similar discipline
• Confidence shaping initiatives or business cases in complex organisations
• Strong analytical and commercial thinking, with the ability to bring structure to ambiguous problems
• The ability to facilitate cross-functional planning and decision-making
• Strong stakeholder engagement skills, with the ability to influence across business units and functional teams
• A practical understanding of planning, sequencing, dependencies, risks, and delivery constraints
• The ability to turn strategy into clear, measurable, delivery-ready initiatives
• A disciplined approach to documentation, decision support, and planning standards

It would ideal if you have:

• Experience working in infrastructure, utilities, regulated, or asset-intensive environments
• A solid technical background, with the ability to apply systems thinking to budget, workforce, and delivery capacity decisions
• Experience working with PMOs, Enterprise Architecture, Finance, delivery partners, consultants, or professional advisors
• Comfort working in environments where priorities shift, trade-offs matter, and perfect information is rarely available — because where’s the fun in easy?

About us

Our purpose is to connect communities. It’s at the heart of everything we do as we serve our customers now and into the future. At Powerco, we’re passionate about doing mahi that keeps over 1.1 million customers connected and enables energy choices as we support Aotearoa on the journey to a low-carbon future.

Ngā Tikanga - Our Way, is what guides us to achieve our purpose and ensures we’re better together, work smarter, proud to be here, and future focused in how we work together with each other, our communities, and industry stakeholders.

📅 Applications close: Friday 26 June 2026

Our ability to get the best out of people is what sets Powerco apart. We realise that candidates – especially from underrepresented and neurodiverse backgrounds – often won’t apply for roles unless they meet ALL the criteria. We encourage anyone who shares our passion for connecting communities to apply for any role that aligns to your strengths and interests. We will provide a safe space where you can bring your whole self to work and thrive.

If you would benefit from support or adjustments in order to participate equitably in the recruitment process, please phone 0800 769372 or email kiaora@powerco.co.nz