Senior Project Controls Specialist

Senior Project Controls Specialist

Position Summary

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.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities

Earned Value and Performance Measurement

• 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 comapny’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.

Stage Gate Support

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.

Capital Benchmarking and Estimating Support

• 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.

Project Financial Data Integration

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 build the reporting and analysis layer that connects it to the CPG’s project controls baselines and turns raw financial data into actionable performance information.

• Extract and interpret project cost data from the company’s ERP system to support earned value calculations, variance analysis, and forecast-to-complete updates. Coordinate with site controllers and corporate finance staff to ensure data is captured at the granularity required for performance measurement.
• Perform budget-vs-actual analysis and commitment tracking, and reconcile EVM performance data against ERP actuals. Identify and escalate systematic gaps between what the ERP captures and what project controls requires.
• Support preparation of post-investment review financial analyses, compiling actual-vs-approved cost data and documenting variance drivers for lessons learned.
• As the company transitions ERP platforms across sites, assist with operationalizing project controls capabilities within the new system — particularly project reporting functionality and cost tracking at the work package level. This initiative will reduce the usage of external spreadsheets to the maximum degree practical.

Tools, Training, and Process Development

• Update, develop, and maintain project controls templates, procedures, and reporting formats that support consistent application of the CPG’s stage gate framework across all sites.
• Provide training and mentoring to site teams on project controls fundamentals, including earned value concepts, contingency management, and progress measurement methods.
• Contribute to continuous improvement of the company’s capital authorization process, stage gate framework, and project reporting tools based on operational experience and lessons learned.

Skills and Knowledge

• Strong working knowledge of earned value management principles and their practical application to capital projects, including baseline management, progress measurement techniques, and performance forecasting.
• Demonstrated proficiency in Critical Path Method (CPM) scheduling independent of any specific software platform, with hands-on experience in Microsoft Project and Primavera P6. Able to assess schedule logic, identify critical path drivers, and evaluate contractor schedule updates.
• Working familiarity with capital cost estimate classification frameworks and the relationship between scope definition, engineering maturity, and estimate accuracy. Enough fluency to assess whether a project estimate’s claimed confidence level is consistent with the work behind it, not to produce estimates independently.
• Ability to extract, interpret, and work with project cost data from enterprise ERP systems. Experience with IFS Cloud is an asset but not required.
• Strong analytical and spreadsheet skills; able to build and maintain financial tracking models, performance dashboards, and benchmarking tools. Proficiency in Excel is essential; experience with data visualization or business intelligence tools is a plus.
• Effective written and verbal communication skills. Able to produce clear, concise project status reports for executive audiences and translate performance data into actionable information for project teams.
• Self-directed and comfortable working independently on analytical tasks while coordinating across multiple sites and organizational functions.

Education and Credentials

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Construction Management, or a related discipline.
• Minimum 7 years of experience in project controls or cost engineering in heavy industry; mining or construction experience preferred. Candidates with 10 or more years including multi-site or corporate-level controls experience are strongly preferred.
• AACE International certification (CCP, EVP, or CEP) or PMP certification is a significant advantage but not required.
• Experience standing up project controls processes and reporting for the first time — not just operating within an existing system — is highly valued.