Agile IT Project Manager (location agnostic) at MFS Africa

MFS Africa has established a joint venture in China to extend our service delivery to Africa/China commerce. The role forms part of a dynamic, responsive, innovative team responsible for ensuring the JV functions as a well-oiled machine. As a core member of the China JV team, this role will be the central point in the operational execution of the big picture goals, expansion of our reach through the introduction of new partners to our vast ecosystem and enabling new services through the introduction of our innovative new use cases for our new partners. This will be done by fully synchronizing all aspects of activities between MFS Africa, our China JV and our respective partners in order to ensure that partner onboarding meets all stakeholders’ expectations. Furthermore, you will be required to embed yourself deeply into the operational aspects of the business in order to be able to:

• Analyze workflows, procedures, and processes to identify opportunities for service improvement and recommend changes.
• Create, implement, and manage improved operational business practices and procedures.
• Additionally, you will be responsible for communicating with stakeholders, understanding technical requirements, and handling other IT integration-type projects as needed. The successful candidate for this role will be a natural leader, who can deliver through a team, can think critically and be a problem-solver with a track-record of successfully completing projects. This role will work closely with and report to Director Projects.

The duties and responsibilities of the role will be as follows:

Operations analysis and improvement

• Identify areas for optimization and improvement at a technical, business model and operational level
• Take responsibility for daily operational activities such as partner integrations and incident management
• Complete impact analyses for all operational improvements
• Evaluating and updating procedures and practices
• Liaise with stakeholders on receiving and executing requests timeously
• Participate in and/or drive efforts to improve capabilities, process improvement and technology projects
• Performing operational systems statistical analysis with business Intelligence department
• Understand technical integration technologies such as API operations based on XML and JSON concepts, as well as other web and database technologies to facilitate decision-making regarding project requirements
• Ensure milestones are reached and deadlines are met throughout project lifecycle
• Assist with internal communication and improving transparency
• Facilitate discussions and drive decision making amongst key stakeholders
• Resolve any issues that may arise during project roll-out

China JV Partner onboarding

• Own partner onboarding projects, interface between MFS Africa, China JV and Partners on partner onboarding aspects (deliverables)
• Work closely with the commercial team on partner onboarding projects, roadmap planning, initiation, execution and closure
• Work with internal technical project management and/or scrum masters on joint planning, management and execution of projects
• Be willing to visit partners to hold necessary workshops on initiating critical onboarding projects and thereafter execute projects remotely until completion
• Approve both formulated and executed test cases against requirement specifications
• Facilitate the removal of impediments between MFS Africa and China JV during the integration process
• Ensure partners and the MFS Africa/China JV team maintain projects’ timelines and provide complete visibility of the process lifecycle for each project planned and under execution
• Create and maintain a roadmap of onboarding projects, with input from relevant teams
• Create detailed project tracking structure for all departments for business-as-usual tasks, in order to introduce predictability in the execution of internal onboarding projects
• Take responsibility for and create reporting structure for daily/weekly/monthly tracking of onboarding projects
• Create and manage a partner onboarding structure and activities plan for the various services
• Prepare and provide detailed updates to management on projects
• Maintain a continuously up-to-date pipeline of onboarding projects
• Drive lessons learned for continual improvement within various departments on the execution of projects

Requirements

Essential skills

• Professional Proficiency in English and Mandarin
• Problem-solving - understand problems and help to identify root causes and appropriate solutions
• Change management – possess the ability to manage changes to our services while giving due consideration to the impact on business
• Community collaboration – facilitate flow of information and feedback loop
• Ownership and initiative – take ownership of and proactively resolve technical problems
• Service focus – ensure that partners, integrations and teams come together to deliver an IT service
• User focus – understand users and their needs based on evidence
• Team player – able to meet work well within a team environment
• Experience in the use of project management philosophies
• Ability to communicate across different organizational levels
• Ability to level shift between exact technical detail to high level big picture and be comfortable with both
• Critical time management skills and critical path identification ability in order to effectively deliver projects on time
• Strong documentation skills using formal project management structure and tools
• Ability to systemically organize large amounts of information
• Creative thinking – propose innovative solutions to solving problems
• Communication – superior oral and written communication skills and the ability to communicate in a clear, concise way

Desirable skills

• Broad technical understanding – specific technical knowledge on Telco/IT, API and general IT systems and the components that underpin the ability to deliver on required tasks and responsibilities
• Continual service improvement - drive the analysis, identification, prioritization and implementation of improvements and efficiencies

Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelors’ degree in Science, Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology or a related field preferred
• At least 3 relevant experience, with project management experience within the IT or Telecommunications sector
• Understanding and previous experience working with different development methodologies
• Comfortable working in a highly complex environment
• Experience with technical projects, not necessarily software

Benefits

• We are highly innovative and were ranked by Fast Company as one of the most innovative companies in the world
• We work at the very cutting edge of fintech in Africa
• We solve relevant problems for Africa and the world. We are building the MFS Africa Hub into a payment infrastructure designed to last 100 years
• We have a culture of caring and execution and a very diverse work environment with over 30+ nationalities represented