Project planning is a critical skill — yet few organisations have a genuine, full-time, permanent need for a senior planner. The need is real, but it's usually concentrated in specific phases: a project's start-up, an engineering peak, a schedule recovery after months of drift.

The hidden cost of hiring for a one-off need

Hiring a senior planner on a permanent contract to cover a three- or six-month need creates a structural problem: recruitment cost, onboarding time, and then the question of what to do with them once the critical phase has passed. On the other hand, under-resourcing the function internally leads to poorly maintained schedules, discovered too late.

A rare skill, hard to evaluate

Real mastery of Primavera P6, MS Project or Planisware goes beyond knowing the software. It requires a deep understanding of dependency logic, critical path analysis, and how a schedule needs to be structured to stay usable over time. That expertise is hard to assess through a standard hiring process, especially for teams that don't have this skill in-house themselves.

The short-term assignment as a structural answer

Bringing in a senior planner on assignment lets you:

  • Mobilise proven expertise without a recruitment delay
  • Match the length of the engagement to the actual need, not a standard contract
  • Get an outside, often more objective, view of an existing schedule
  • Shift from a short assignment to a longer engagement if the project context requires it, without complex renegotiation

What to check before choosing a provider

Three things deserve particular attention: the planner's actual experience on projects comparable to yours (sector, size, contractual complexity), clarity of the point of contact — a single person accountable for the assignment rather than a chain of subcontracting — and the ability to adapt to the format you need, on-site or remote.

This is exactly the model Primavera Planner is built on: a senior lead planner as your single point of contact, able to mobilise a tight-knit network of certified experts as the scope of the need grows.