Business Planning Manager
Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: London Store Support Centre and Home, London, EC1M 6HA
Contract type: Permanent
Business area: Finance & Business Development
Closing date: 11 May 2026
Requisition ID: 400057850
We’d all like amazing work to do, and real work-life balance. That’s waiting for you here at Sainsbury’s. For a FTSE business, we move incredibly fast. When we’re not leading projects, we’re supporting teams across the wider group to achieve their goals. And here, you can see the impact of your work as soon as you walk into a store, giving you a real sense of purpose and responsibility. Better still, the team around you will listen to your ideas and opinions, and you’ll have every chance to try something new. The scale and complexity of our business mean there’s always something new to learn, and we’ll support you every step of the way. We’re trusted to get on with it. So get ready to make things happen.
About the team
Business Planning is a new, independent team reporting through to the CEO, created to ensure there is a clear ‘golden thread’ between Sainsbury’s strategy and the change activity delivered across the business. We bring clarity to what matters most, connect work across functions, and enable timely, well-informed decisions so that our transformation agenda lands with pace and impact.
More about the role
As Business Planning Manager, you’ll work closely with and report into the Head of Business Planning to shape and embed our enterprise planning approach, supporting delivery of Sainsbury’s multi‑year change agenda.
Day to day, you’ll build and run the planning framework and ‘drumbeat’ (annual and quarterly cycles), ensuring the right information, forums and decisions are in place to align outcomes, prioritise work and manage dependencies across programmes.
You’ll create and maintain a ‘one version of the truth’ view of change activity—bringing together programme data, benefits, milestones, resource requirements and key risks—so leaders can see progress and make course‑corrections quickly. You’ll also own Business Planning management information (including OKRs and progress reporting), support Operating Board updates, and continuously improve processes, controls and tooling (e.g., Power BI dashboards and planning templates) to make planning simpler and more effective for teams across the organisation.
More about you
You bring demonstrable experience of enterprise or portfolio planning, with the ability to translate strategy into an actionable plan and run disciplined planning cycles. You’re comfortable working with complex data sets and programme information, turning them into clear insights, options and recommendations for senior stakeholders.
You build trusted relationships quickly and can influence across diverse stakeholder groups—from strategy and finance to programme and delivery leaders—using clear, tailored communication. You take ownership, spot opportunities to improve how things work, and role‑model collaborative, end‑to‑end ways of working while helping teams deliver at pace and learn fast.
Essential
- Successful experience working on the implementation and management of Enterprise Annual Business Planning with hands on experience facilitating and managing quarterly planning.
- Strong organization and stakeholder management skills with hands on experience delivering and tailoring messages to audiences at all levels of seniority with ability to demonstrate structured approach to solving problems.
- Ability to engage and gain buy-in from strategy teams, business stakeholders, project managers and delivery leads with excellent verbal and written communication skills to facilitate decision making and course correction decisions.
- Experience in producing business-wide reporting, coordinating, and developing prioritisation options that enable the right behaviour and decision making.
- Ability to work independently and drive change proactively across different stakeholder groups with attention to detail in providing accurate and timely programme information.
- IT fluent with Microsoft applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PowerBI)
Desirable
- Experience in supporting the organising and structuring of complex programmes
- Successful experience of working with or within an Enterprise Transformation function and providing oversight of complex transformation portfolios.
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We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new — whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them: Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 20% of salary, depending on how we perform. Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance, and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday, and we provide private healthcare. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, interest free car loan of up to £10k, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an Employee Assistance Programme. Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave. Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).
