Planning Engineer II

Overview

Planning Engineer II – Duluth, MN. Duration: 12 Months. Hybrid schedule, in office Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Responsible for developing and coordinating a comprehensive integrated, detailed facility-by-facility plan for all LP facility work, encompassing Operations, Core Programs, and Major Projects activities. The position ensures that all interdependent risks and mitigation strategies—such as construction sequencing, permitting, contractor work space, and material availability—are centrally identified and communicated across all scopes within each facility. The overarching goal is to enable successful execution of all planned work within designated outage windows, achieving targeted in-service dates.

• Facilitate detailed site scheduling in collaboration with Operations, PMs, CMs, Project Controls, and Major Projects—driving optimization, risk reduction, and meeting pipeline outage and ISD requirements.
• Monitor and flag schedule and coordination risks (e.g., permits, material lead times, outages, contractor overlap, task sequencing) to relevant stakeholders.
• Ensure plans and schedules are feasible, achievable, meet pipeline outage durations, and ISD requirements.
• Create and maintain a log of critical materials, outage windows, contractor tasks, and their interdependencies across facilities for proactive resolution.
• Act as a change agent—identifying gaps, risks, solutions, and recommendations to PMs, CMs, and Leadership.
• Ensure all strategies, changes, updates, etc., to schedule(s) are made (once approved by the PM).
• Work closely with the Project Controls scheduler(s) to establish and maintain effective data flows and communication, ensuring quality, consistency, and accuracy of data while providing positive feedback loops.

• Analyze scope and contracting strategies across Operations, Core, and Major Projects, recommending optimization opportunities to optimize work at each facility.
• Example:
  Identify overlapping subcontractor usage (e.g., hydrovac services) and recommend streamlining to a single provider for efficiency.
• Analyze contractor work plans to understand the type, amount, durations, etc., of equipment on site (e.g., whether four 15-ton picker trucks are on site when only two are needed) and provide recommendations to construction management and project management to optimize the work.

• Own and manage overall site plot plans (schedule and work space areas) for all scopes (MCI, MLO, LRF) across all groups (Operations, Major Projects, Core, PCSLD).
• Identify work area/scope overlaps and potential construction interference (e.g., long spans of trenched cables impacting other work scopes and their schedules/work spaces).
• Identify potential safety risks from overall site congestion and advise PMs, CMs, and Leadership.
• Understand and work with Construction management on site laydown and storage requirements, understand and monitor road closures (from Project and Operations work) and highlight to construction management.
• Work closely with the Operations Coordination team on outage management, ensuring they are integrated into the site schedule(s), and log and track necessary operations/outage information.
• Review and analyze portfolio-wide schedules to identify risks and opportunities, providing insights to Execution Managers.

• With a customer service mindset, act as a trusted advisor and strategic partner to PMs, CMs, Operations, and stakeholders—ensuring alignment, transparency, and accountability.
• Adapt to meet evolving customer needs with agility and a one-client mindset.
• Work with Project Controls schedulers and integrate them into the schedule discussions with PMs, CMs, Operations, etc., to ensure P6 data is accurate and correct.

• The single point of contact for consolidating all schedules, reports, risk tables, etc., for all stations.
• Provide guidance and QA to all other Planning Coordinator areas to ensure consistency throughout.
• Responsible for creating procedures and processes required for the department.

Executes…