Planning Systems and Solutions Manager

Job Summary

The Planning Systems & Solutions Manage provides strategic and technical leadership for the administration, enhancement, and integration of budgeting and financial planning systems, including Adaptive Planning, Workday and related applications. The role ensures these systems are reliable, user‑friendly, and aligned with institutional data and governance standards to support efficient planning and forecasting processes.

The Planning Systems & Solutions Manager collaborates closely with managers and leaders in central finance teams, including Business Intelligence team, Finance Operations, and administrative portfolios and faculties to advance scenario functionality, automation, data integration, and overall system usability. As the technical and strategic lead for planning tools, the role contributes directly to UBC’s financial planning modernization agenda by guiding system improvements that strengthen decision‑support capabilities, operational efficiency, and long‑term institutional sustainability.

Organizational Status
Reports to the Senior Director, Budget & Financial Planning (FP&A) and works in close coordination with the Manager, Budgeting & Forecasting; Manager, Funding and the BI team.

Work Performed

• Provides strategic leadership for the design, governance, and continuous enhancement of Adaptive Planning, Calumo and related budgeting, forecasting, and financial modeling applications to enable advanced planning capabilities across the institution.
• Serves as the senior liaison between central finance, decentralized units, IRP, UBC IT, Business Intelligence, and Financial Operations, ensuring planning systems, reporting needs, and underlying financial data structures remain aligned and strategically integrated.
• Leads the development and execution of the financial planning systems roadmap, guiding multi‑year enhancements, modernization initiatives, and integration improvements that strengthen UBC’s enterprise financial ecosystem.
• Oversees the development, testing, and deployment of system configurations, models, templates, and forecasting frameworks, ensuring they reflect institutional strategic priorities, financial governance standards, and evolving planning requirements.
• Ensures alignment of chart of accounts, reporting hierarchies, data structures, and account mappings across all core financial systems and enterprise reporting platforms (e.g., Adaptive Planning, Workday, Calumo), enabling consistent, high‑quality financial information.
• Provides stewardship of system security, access protocols, and data governance in partnership with IT and Financial Operations, ensuring integrity, compliance, and appropriate risk mitigation across financial planning applications.
• Leads the design and continuous improvement of scenario modeling tools, forecasting functionality, and multi‑year planning models to support strategic decision‑making by executive leadership, faculties, and administrative units.
• Acts as a strategic advisor to decentralized finance teams, translating complex processes into actionable insights and guiding effective use of planning technologies to improve local decision‑support capabilities.
• Champions process improvement and operational excellence by identifying opportunities to enhance system workflows, template usability, user experience, and submission consistency, leveraging university enterprise applications to drive efficiency and service quality.
• Oversees and elevates user support, training, and documentation strategies to build institutional capability and a strong community of practice across analysts, planning staff, and power users.
• Supports key transformation initiatives related to budgeting, forecasting, activity‑based costing, and financial performance management, ensuring systems and processes support UBC’s long‑term financial sustainability and strategic goals.
• Directs the development of tools and process to support comprehensive financial reports, scenario analyses, and multi‑year forecasts that inform strategic planning and executive‑level decision‑making, ensuring outputs meet internal and external reporting standards.
• Partners with Financial Reporting, Treasury, IT, Capital, Financial Reporting and other functional stakeholders to ensure alignment of financial assumptions, data consistency, and cohesive reporting standards across the university.
• Other duties as assigned.
  

Consequence of Error/Judgement
Errors in system configuration, access control, or data integration may result in unreliable financial plans, institutional misalignment, or disruption of planning processes. The role requires sound judgment, attention to detail, and strong understanding of both systems and university finance to ensure integrity and usability of planning tools.

Supervision Received
Reports to the Senior Director, Budget & Financial Planning (FP&A) and works with full latitude. Work is reviewed in terms of achievement of broad and long-term goals. Receives strategic direction and priorities but is expected to lead technical execution and planning system management with minimal supervision.

Supervision Given
Manages staff directly or indirectly through subordinate managers and supervisors. Provides guidance to decentralized planning staff and power users across faculties and administrative units and oversight to the external vendors.

Minimum Qualifications
Undergraduate degree in relevant discipline. Completion of the CPA accounting program (CA, CGA or CMA). Minimum of eight years of related experience, or the equivalent combination of education and experience.

- Willingness to respect diverse perspectives, including perspectives in conflict with one’s own

- Demonstrates a commitment to enhancing one’s own awareness, knowledge, and skills related to equity, diversity, and inclusion

Preferred Qualifications

• Undergraduate degree in business, finance, information systems, or a related field is critical.
• Experience in financial planning systems administration, ideally within a complex public-sector or higher education environment is highly important.
• Experience with Adaptive Planning, Workday, or similar enterprise planning tools required
• Knowledge of financial planning, forecasting, and budgeting processes and strong understanding of system integration, data governance, and analytics platforms will be critical to the role.
• Excellent communication and user support skills with the ability to translate complex financial system functionality and data structures into clear, practical guidance for finance and non-finance users.
• Strong financial systems acumen and analytical thinking, including understanding of budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, and reporting processes, and the ability to troubleshoot system issues, validate data integrity, and analyze system outputs to ensure accuracy and reliability.
• Demonstrated process improvement and technical execution skills with experience designing, optimizing and documenting workflows, implementing system enhancements and driving initiatives to improve efficiency.
• User-centered support and training delivery experience.
• Proven ability to collaborate across finance, IT, and data functions.
• High degree of adaptability and commitment to continuous learning. Stays current of evolving technologies, system capabilities and best practices.
• Integrity and accountability in data management.