Requirement: Project Support Officer
Location: Braine-l'Alleud, BELGIUM
Full Time On-Site: No
Time On-Site: 40%
Not to Exceed Rate: 79 EUR
Total Scope of the request (hours): 836
Required Start Date: 15 June 2026
End Contract Date: 31 December 2026
Required Security Clearance: NATO SECRET
Please do NOT apply for any NATO contract positions unless you meet ALL the following criteria:
- Current National or NATO SECRET clearance
- Nationality of one of the NATO member countries
- Current work visa for the specific location if applying for an in-country position
Duties & Role:
Planning & Schedule Control:
- Maintain the master project plan and detailed work schedules in the agreed planning tool, updating progress weekly from workstream leads and flagging slippage or critical path risks to the Project Manager.
- Prepare look-ahead schedules, Gantt charts, and milestone trackers for use in project board meetings and team briefings.
- Support re-planning exercises at stage boundaries or when approved changes require a revised baseline.
- Own and maintain the RAID log (Risks, Actions, Issues, Dependencies), chasing owners for updates and escalating overdue items.
- Maintain the Risk Register, Issue Register, Lessons Log, Quality Register, and Decision Log, ensuring entries are current, consistently formatted, and reviewed at the appropriate governance forum.
- Track change requests through the change control process, recording the details of each approved change against the baseline.
- Establish and maintain the project filing structure, enforcing version control, naming conventions, and access permissions across the shared workspace.
- Manage the flow of project documents — distributing pre-reads, collecting sign-offs, archiving approved deliverables, and ensuring the team always works from the latest version.
- Act as configuration librarian where required, tracking the status of all formal project products.
- Track project expenditure against the approved budget, recording actuals, commitments, and forecasts and flagging variances to the Project Manager.
- Process purchase orders, timesheets, and contractor invoices through the agreed workflow, ensuring costs are coded to the correct budget lines.
- Maintain the resource allocation schedule and highlight conflicts or gaps requiring management attention.
- Coordinate site access arrangements for audit teams, refresh contractors, and specialist surveyors, liaising with local security points of contacts to secure the required access.
- Maintain the site visit schedule, tracking confirmed dates, access permits, security clearances, and any site-specific induction or health and safety requirements that must be completed before arrival.
- Maintain a site access tracker that records visit outcomes — completed, rescheduled, or denied — and flags sites with repeated access difficulties to the Project Manager for escalation to the Vendor Manager or client.
- Coordinate with contractors and internal teams to sequence site visits efficiently, grouping geographically close sites into logical routes and avoiding clashes where multiple teams require access to the same location.
- Ensure all site visit documentation — access request forms, risk assessments, method statements, and photographic evidence of completed work — is collected, filed, and linked to the relevant site record in the project filing structure.
- Draft highlight reports, checkpoint reports, and dashboard packs for the Project Manager's review, pulling together schedule, cost, risk, and quality data into a clear narrative.
- Organise all project meetings — booking rooms or virtual sessions, preparing agendas, circulating papers, and confirming attendance.
- Take accurate minutes, record decisions and actions with owners and deadlines, and follow up on outstanding actions between meetings.
- Maintain the forward calendar of stage gates, board meetings, and quality reviews, ensuring all required inputs are prepared on time.
Act as the first point of contact for administrative queries from team members, directing people to the right templates, processes, or escalation routes.
Specific Working Conditions: The job requires frequent travel to NATO sites. The incumbent might travel around 4 times a month to other locations in Belgium.
Requirements
Skill, Knowledge & Experience:
- The candidate must have a currently active NATO SECRET security clearance
- Strong proficiency in project scheduling tools — ideally Microsoft Project and ServiceNow
- Advanced Excel skills including pivot tables, lookups, conditional formatting, and the ability to build and maintain cost trackers and resource models.
- Confident user of Microsoft 365 (SharePoint, Teams, Word, PowerPoint) for document management, collaboration, and reporting.
- Ability to build clear, concise dashboards and visual reports that translate raw data into RAG statuses, trend charts, and exception summaries for senior audiences.
- Familiarity with project management information systems (PMIS) or portfolio tools
- Exceptional attention to detail — the kind of person who notices a version number is wrong, a date has shifted, or a name is misspelled before it reaches a board pack.
- Highly organised with the ability to manage multiple concurrent tasks, deadlines, and information flows without dropping things.
- Strong written communication — able to draft clear, grammatically correct minutes, reports, and status updates that require minimal editing by the Project Manager.
- Proactive and self-starting — able to anticipate what the Project Manager will need next rather than waiting to be asked.
- Diplomatic and persistent when chasing actions from colleagues, contractors, and senior stakeholders who may not prioritise the PSO's requests.
- Comfortable working across all levels of seniority, from site teams to the project board, and adapting communication style accordingly.
- Calm under pressure, particularly during busy reporting periods, stage gates, or when multiple deadlines converge.
- Trustworthy with sensitive information — the PSO will have visibility of financial data , personnel matters, and pre-decisional papers.
- Team-oriented with a willingness to pick up whatever needs doing — the PSO role is broad and sometimes unglamorous, and the right person takes pride in making the whole team more effective.
- Willing to challenge constructively — confident enough to push back if a process is being bypassed or a standard is slipping, even when the person cutting corners is more senior.
