Senior Forecast Manager

Job Title: Senior Forecast Manager

Location: London Working Mode: Hybrid (3 Days Onsite)

Description:

Passenger traffic is one of the most significant drivers of client's planning, performance, and finances. Accurate, widely understood, and well-evidenced forecasts for the medium and long term are, therefore, a necessity for the company. The role will involve leading the delivery of these forecasts and the continuous improvement of the methodologies, quality of inputs and quality and usefulness of the outputs. The role will include engaging with senior managers across as well as customers, investors and others externally to ensure best use of the forecast outputs.

The role will also involve supporting the Head of Forecasting in the development of the forecast models and outputs for client's growth over the next 30 years. There is a particularly critical period of development in the forecasting team as we look to build a once in a generation forecast for a growing - exploiting the new capabilities from programming, cloud-based computing, machine learning, AI, Monte Carlo methods and big data to drive passenger forecasts.

Principal Accountabilities:

• Accountability for the delivery of the airports Early Warning Indicators. This dashboard helps to plan the business's growth out of the nadir of COVID-19 impacted passenger numbers. This will include monitoring of cases across the world, especially in key markets, the governmental responses, and the impact this has on airports worldwide and consumer confidence.
• Accountability for the delivery of the medium-term forecasts used for business planning. Use a strong knowledge of the airport and airline businesses to produce detailed forecasts. Drive the use of new data sources and techniques (e.g. big data, machine learning) to enrich and improve the accuracy of the forecasts. Present forecasts to the Finance and Customer teams and individual Executive team members.
• Drive project work across multiple teams and external consultants to both develop new forecasts and new forecast methodologies that exploit emerging techniques including chairing of a Red Team challenging our assumptions in our forecasting.
• Lead the monthly analysis of business data to provide insight and reporting on current and expected passenger performance, and present findings to senior managers and communicate to the broader business, the Exec, and the Board. Work with the Airline Business Development team to identify root causes and commercial opportunities. Also, fulfil 's external reporting obligations and support the regular press activity around passenger data.
• Provide monthly passenger traffic reports to the CAA, ACI and other internal and external parties, including Exec and senior management.
• Explore the need and desire for producing operational scenario planning for events, such as snow and storm impacts and strategic ones such as industrial action and other scenarios on the UK government's risk register.
• Supervise and mentor capacity and forecast analysts in support of the above deliverables and help create a steady pipeline of world-class analysts in the capacity and passenger forecasting space.
• Exercise technical expertise to continuously improve the processes and tools used for forecasting. Make maximum use of the latest technology and techniques to achieve higher accuracy, efficiency, and process robustness. Develop cross-functional links with other related teams to ensure builds an increasingly cohesive analytic capability, and role model this behaviour. Similarly, reach out to external experts and associated fields - be they at other airports, the wider industry or academic or leading-edge private research efforts. Ensure that this expertise flows into .
• Build networks internally and externally to improve the sourcing of data and to provide greater forecast insight and confidence. Engage with senior management of airlines to refine and validate forecast outputs.
• Support short- and long-term forecasting as required and respond to any ad-hoc analytical requests with a timely and accurate response.
• Ensure that historic and future traffic demand data being used in capacity and/or demand related programmes is consistent across the business and being used appropriately.

Requirement:

• Educated to degree or master's level in a quantitative discipline (e.g., Maths, Engineering, Economics) with statistical, econometric or demand forecasting training an advantage.
• Broad knowledge of airport operations and aviation sector, along with a strong awareness of economic concepts and an interest in macro-economic issues.
• A track record of delivering complete work to demanding timescales and making recommendations that have influenced business strategies and made improvements to processes or policies.
• Excellent at quickly assimilating complex information and determining the salient points and consequences.
• Ability to make reasoned judgements based on uncertain information in a commercially intelligent way
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with experience of presenting complex ideas, evidence, and processes concisely to senior and external audiences.
• Highly numerate with excellent analytical skills, and an advanced user in Excel and a competent user of MS Word, PowerPoint, PowerBI and other O365 applications.
• A basic understanding and knowledge of R and Python- and a desire to develop is essential. Similarly, interest and aptitude for mastering new analytical techniques
• Experience of leading people and projects in a customer focussed environment.