Manager: Management Information at Absa

We are pleased to be bringing to the market this exciting role that will lead a team which will continue to build and work on our vast data assets to empower downstream consumers of data and management information, while ensuring that we stay on the cutting edge of data management best practice.

Essentially, we need a strong technical candidate (who speaks machine), while also wielding a distinctive aptitude in speaking human (stakeholder and team leadership). This will include developing a good understanding of how the business functions, identifying the data that enables the business to stay on course in its strategic journey and prioritizing work for the team accordingly.

While we have a healthy book of work and plenty of problems to intellectually challenge our newest team member, we maintain much-needed flexibility for analysts and leaders alike to take on projects that they identify in the business as well!

Job Description
KEY RESPONSIBILITIES:
Technical Leadership

• Engage with internal business and technical stakeholders to understand requirements and ensure objectives, priorities and key requirements are agreed and understood. Interpret data and identify issues, risks and opportunities and relay results and insights to business users.

• Provide risk, governance, compliance and broader regulatory reporting as required and contribute to these processes as a data expert

• Build analytics tools that utilize the data pipeline to reliably communicate key business metrics and insights to business stakeholders in a manner that leverages information design techniques to achieve high utilization levels by the business stakeholder community.

• Improve the quality and turnaround times of key deliverables through the automation of tasks through the use of appropriate tools / scripting technologies and debugging new /existing scripts and code

• Leverage best practice to build and continually improve on high quality data collection, transformation, storage, retrieval, storytelling and visualization. This includes keeping abreast with existing and emerging techniques and technologies in the data value-chain to identify key pivot points for the business.

• Understand the technical landscape and bank-wide architecture that is connected to or dependent on the business to effectively collaborate with teams embedding solutions that impact the Home Loans data value-chain.

Team and Stakeholder Leadership

• Build a high performance team environment through self-directed team members that continually build towards mastery and are aligned by the team’s purpose. Implementation of pragmatic team routines to achieve this (including regular check-ins, coaching, constructive feedback etc.).

• Plan, manage and monitor the implementation of team solutions, activities and processes to deliver on approved operational plans in an effective and efficient manner.

• Conduct peer reviews within the broader analytics community and contribute to the building of an analytics team capability in the use of data solutions

• Proactively partner with the data architecture and data science teams in applying relevant best practice to actively shape the data landscape in the business, with the aim of improving upstream and downstream data processes to support the business.
• Promote data literacy within the business stakeholder community by effectively communicating the business value of making data-led decisions, embedding technologies that enable the business stakeholder community to navigate the data landscape and refining team working routines that promote improving turnaround times on data-enabled business processes.
• Stay ahead of the curve on data science trends, tools and techniques to transition the team and the organization as required.

MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS:

• Bachelor (Honors) degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering, Science or equivalent NQF level 8 qualification
• At least 8 years’ postgraduate work experience in a technology / digital / analytics role
• At least 3 years’ work experience in a similar role at management level
• Expert knowledge of data query tools: SAS, SQL, Spark
• Expert knowledge of data services, data discovery and visualization tools: DaaS, PowerBI
• Expert knowledge of data warehousing solutions and processes
   

WHAT’S ON OFFER:

• Autonomy: Flexibility in the book of work where you will be encouraged to find/develop passion projects in the business, alongside the challenging assignments that the team already has on the go
• Mastery: an environment that will stretch you in bringing your technical and team leadership toolkits to bear in advancing business priorities
• Purpose: in a world where assumptions about how the business operates have been upended, the team plays an active role in democratizing information and enabling the business to validate its learning
• Culture: a great environment where the team culture is in its next evolutionary step to build combination solutions that far surpass the sum of individual team member solutions