Senior Project Controls Specialist

Senior Project Controls Specialist

The Senior Project Controls Specialist will be foundational to the corporate projects group's controls capability by helping implement earned value management, maintaining project baselines, and tracking project performance against approved budgets and schedules. The CPG is responsible for active management of major projects (>$10M), and for providing controls and advisory support to site-lead teams for smaller projects.

The ideal candidate combines strong project controls methodology with enough financial literacy to work directly with ERP data and coordinate with site and corporate finance staff. They understand that project controls exist to provide an independent assessment of project health — separate from the execution team's self-reporting — and they value working in an organization that treats objective performance data as the basis for decision-making.

• Establish and maintain cost and schedule baselines for major capital projects, aligned with approved project budgets and schedules.
• Implement and operate earned value management (EVM) processes, including calculation and reporting of planned value, earned value, actual cost, and derived performance indices (CPI, SPI). For projects not managed under full EVM, collect and report simplified performance metrics including percent-complete and estimate at completion.
• Produce monthly project performance reports for senior leadership and the company's capital investment review committee, including variance analyses, forecast-to-complete updates, and trend assessments.
• Monitor contingency drawdown against approved budgets and proactively flag when cost or schedule variances are approaching thresholds that require supplemental funding authorization or scope reassessment.

Major capital projects at the company follow a stage gate process in which projects must pass through a series of formal decision points — typically up to three gates — before receiving full authorization to proceed. Each gate requires the project team to demonstrate that scope definition, cost estimates, risk assessment, and execution planning have reached a level of maturity appropriate for the next phase.

The number of gates is determined during the annual budget review based on project complexity and business risk. Simpler projects may have a single gate; complex or high-value projects progress through multiple gates from preliminary analysis through options evaluation, engineering, and final execution approval.

The Senior Project Controls Specialist will provide support to the Stage Gate process by:

• Preparing objective, data-driven gate review packages for each stage gate decision point by validating and assembling the cost, schedule, risk, and scope evidence prepared by project teams that reviewers use to determine whether a project is ready to advance to the next phase.
• Maintaining project status tracking across the stage-gated portfolio, including milestone adherence, cost trending, and scope change history.
• Assisting project teams in developing Work Breakdown Structures (WBS) that provide the structure needed for earned value measurement and align with Hecla's capital authorization requirements.

• Develop, maintain, and refine capital cost benchmarking datasets, tools, and reference materials used to validate project estimates and support annual budget reviews.
• Review project cost estimates for consistency between the claimed accuracy class and the actual level of engineering and scope definition behind the numbers. The controls specialist is not the cost estimator, but must be able to assess whether an estimate's stated confidence level is supportable.
• Support annual capital budget and long-range plan reviews by providing historical performance data and benchmarks that inform leadership's assessment of proposed project costs and timing.

The company's ERP system supports WBS-level cost tracking and systematic commitment accounting. The infrastructure to capture project financial data exists; the opportunity is to…