Senior Planning Officer

LIKELY QUESTIONS

- How would you support the formulation and review of the Financial Reporting Centre's Strategic Plan while ensuring alignment with institutional mandates and stakeholder expectations?
- Describe your experience developing annual work plans, performance contracts, indicators and targets for departments or programmes.
- What process would you use to verify data and statistics submitted by different departments before including them in a performance report?
- How would you design a monitoring and evaluation framework for a strategic objective that involves multiple internal stakeholders?
- Tell us about a time you identified underperformance against a work plan or strategic target. What analysis did you conduct and what action did you recommend?
- How would you conduct a survey study to identify emerging issues that could affect delivery of the Centre's Strategic Plan?
- What experience do you have in developing, reviewing or improving policies and procedures, and how did you ensure implementation?
- How would you support departmental budget estimates and link resource requests to annual work plan priorities, risks and expected results?

BEHAVIOURAL QUESTIONS

- Tell us about a time you had to compile a high-stakes report using incomplete, inconsistent or late data from multiple sources.
Model approach: Situation: Set the context of a quarterly or annual performance report with fragmented submissions. Task: Explain your responsibility for producing an accurate, timely report. Action: Describe creating a data template, setting definitions, reconciling discrepancies against source records, following up with data owners, documenting assumptions and escalating material gaps. Result: Quantify improved submission timeliness, data accuracy, management confidence or use of the report in decision-making.

- Describe a time you influenced stakeholders to adopt a planning, monitoring or reporting process they initially resisted.
Model approach: Situation: Identify a new performance framework, work-planning template or reporting requirement that met resistance. Task: State your role in securing cooperation without compromising standards. Action: Explain how you consulted stakeholders, clarified the purpose, simplified tools, provided training and used feedback to improve implementation. Result: Show adoption rates, improved report quality, stronger accountability or faster planning cycles.

- Give an example of when you identified an operational risk that could affect delivery of a plan or programme.
Model approach: Situation: Describe the strategic initiative, annual work plan or operational process at risk. Task: Explain your responsibility for identifying and documenting the risk. Action: Cover risk analysis, likelihood and impact assessment, engagement with risk owners, proposed controls, contingency actions and monitoring arrangements. Result: Show how the mitigation reduced delays, protected resources, improved compliance or enabled delivery of a target.

- Tell us about a time you improved a planning, reporting or monitoring process.
Model approach: Situation: Describe the previous process and its weaknesses, such as manual consolidation, unclear indicators, duplicated reporting or delayed submissions. Task: State the improvement objective. Action: Explain how you analysed root causes, redesigned templates or workflows, introduced quality checks, automated calculations where appropriate and trained users. Result: Quantify time saved, error reduction, improved completeness or better management visibility.

SMART QUESTIONS TO ASK

- What are the Centre's highest-priority strategic planning and performance management deliverables for the next 12 months?
- How are performance indicators currently cascaded from the Strategic Plan to departmental annual work plans and individual performance commitments?
- What are the most significant data-quality or reporting challenges the planning function is currently working to address?
- How does the Centre use monitoring and evaluation findings to adjust programmes, policies, resource allocation or operational priorities?
- What would distinguish outstanding performance in this role during the first six months?

RED FLAGS TO WATCH FOR

- Unclear ownership of performance data, with departments expected to submit reports but no agreed indicator definitions, data standards or accountability for quality.
- A role described as strategic planning and M&E that is primarily last-minute report compilation, with unrealistic deadlines and limited access to source data or decision-makers.
- No clear Strategic Plan implementation framework, performance review calendar, risk-management process or management commitment to act on monitoring findings.