Senior Manager - Delivery Digital Platforms and Services Technology Information at MTN

Job Description

Strategy input:

• Advocate and evangelize the adoption of new technologies to enable MTN Digital Platforms and Services Business
• Develop goals, strategies, and plans needed to achieve the portfolios vision and build the capabilities to enable optimal delivery with input from relevant stakeholders.
• Align planning against the strategic intent of the company with agreed business outcomes within the portfolio, relevant IT Architecture Enterprise principles, key approved decisions and enterprise wide programs.
• Champion and rally the IT and CBU, EBU, Wholesale organisation around new Digital Technologies and educate these areas on the value of the portfolio to enable revenue generation, cost savings and business performance measurements.
• Recommend strategic business opportunities to deliver medium to long-term benefit and growth to the organisation and its customers.
• Translate the strategic vision into intelligence requirements and drive the fulfilment of these technical requirements.
• Ensure the enablement of a self-service philosophy
• Influence the technology roadmap defined by MTN SA Enterprise architecture and Group Technology. 
• Investigate strategic IT trends (including initiating and executing relevant proof of concepts) and provides feedback regarding the impact and alignment required.
• Lead the strategy to adopt key new technologies to enable best in class real time digital platforms and services 
• Conduct strategic analysis of MTN system strategies to ensure that the strategic technological direction aligns and supports MTN Group objectives.
• Understand MTN Digital business strategy and align channel, integration, billing, charging, customer value management and big data application architecture and roadmap accordingly
• Maintain close relationship with architecture and technical delivery teams to ensure that architecture and technical work items are developed according to defined architecture principles and patterns
• Leverage best practice knowledge and experience to define technical solutions that enable online business capabilities, ensuring the reuse of existing components

Tactical Planning and Operations 

• Provide operational leadership to the team, in line with business requirements, technology standards and best practices within the business intelligence function.
• Drive best practice, continuous improvement and innovation, continuously refine the digital platform and services needs of the assigned business units
• Utilise technology to optimise the data dissemination 
• Enable business units to track performance reporting at a business unit level
• Identify and support initiatives to identify redundant / duplicated reporting
• Support and proactively drive system optimisation research.
• Influence and manage SLA’s with Infrastructure and Network support to ensure high levels of availability and limit redundancy.
• Engage with other operations to extract potential benefits and efficiencies achieved at a technical implementation and/or process layer.
• Ensure that vendor and 3rd party developers are developing applications that comply with business specifications and implemented according to approved quality standards
• Provide consultation for all applications related projects so that decisions can be made as to the most appropriate delivery methodology
• Ensure SLA’s are in place for timely production data and dashboard update delivery with business and other data users.
• Ensure delivery of (authorised) projects according to the prioritised project list
• Refine the information, reporting, and analytical needs of the organisation.
• Define and establish management systems, processes, policies and procedures for effective team functioning.
• Ensure  the team performs the necessary analysis, design, modelling and documentation tasks necessary to pass MTN IS governance forums
• Provide high level analysis and design reviews to other teams to avoid duplication efforts in solving the same application problems within different products within MTN
• Provide consultation on critical business and IT problems, researching and identifying enabling technologies based on customer requirements and defined business processes
• Develop and implement IS solutions that meet business and IT requirements. These include functionality, processes, data, major products to be used, application interfaces internally and external to MTN.
• Participate in the design and implementation of an enterprise architecture based on business requirements and information technology strategies and trends.
• Partner with business leaders and peer-level managers to assess the technological cost and impact of recommended changes, help clarify priorities and coordinate cross-organizational consortia where common needs have been identified.
• Identify, interpret and guide future development by using the appropriate technology to provide solutions using the available technologies

Financial Management 

• Draft, present and manage Capex and Opex budgets relating to functional activities
• Assist in the forecasting, planning and development of the portfolio’s budget and business plans for IS
• Give input into budgets that will enable delivery of area of expertise to the relevant business unit.
• Manage and optimise departmental budget, ensuring all expenditure is in line with the agreed budgets.
• Ensure that Yearly CAPEX Plans are put in place and that each team member provides proper input and information into these
• Support the creation of the business case for initiatives and projects in functional areas
• Assist in tracking infrastructure budgets related to the support of business area platforms, processes and initiatives 
• Assist in ensuring contract information is updated centrally and drive with the IS Commercial team
• Adhere to a non-inflationary or escalating contract pricing model

Customer

• One the primary objectives is to ensure the team delivers on requirements set by the business and make sure that changes needed on platforms owned take place on time and within budget. In addition, all changes must be of a high quality such that bugs are kept to a minimum to ensure smooth testing cycles
• Support all digital initiatives across CBU, EBU and Wholesale. Key accountability to deliver roadmap as defined by the BU Executives.
• Key interfaces are Group Technology Architecture, Cloud and Security, Strategy and Transformation BU, GM and Executives of CBU, EBU and Wholesale BU 
• Ensure that Digital Platforms and Services present to business on a regular basis new industry technologies and capabilities 

Internal Processes

• Ensure Delivery of Internal Business as Usual Projects through continual identification of 
• Capacity Upgrades that are required due to Network Traffic
• Software Upgrades required to ensure adherence to maintenance agreements
• Aspects of a system that have not been performing optimally that require changes to architecture
• Hardware that is reaching end of life and requires replacement
• Any PoC required to demonstrate some item of functionality to Business
• These constitute all BAU project work that needs to take place in any given year and need to be executed on time and on budget
• Make sure that team members work together with Operational areas (full system co-ownership)
• Planning and Operational areas need to function as a cohesive unit
• Working relationships with Operational area must include:
• Discussing status of projects
• Discussing new projects on the horizon
• Discussing system issues that may or may not require planning analysis
• Ensuring that Operations is involved in a project every step of the way, such that they can prepare for ATP work and any roll-out activities
• Provide Operations the opportunity to provide ideas on system evolution from the perspective of maintaining platforms on a day-to-day basis
• Perform ATPs with Operations and vendors
• Help test system functioning through the application of custom scripts
• Make sure that common area for capturing and updating of Project Info exist and are used and ensure that all documentation, scripts and project information in stored in a central fashion and is easily accessible to the team and that methods for applying versions are logical and consistently followed

Project Delivery

• Develop and drive the execution of agreed projects 
• Drive the implementation, tracking, monitoring and compliance of Projects
• Contract management in line with Procurement Policies
• Co-ordinate project reporting
• Ensure effective implementation of the integrated project management model 
• Risk management

Core planning functions

• Ensure that the team defines, plans, architects and implements requirements with vendors and Operational area
• Ensure that Living System Logical Architecture Documentation is updated with each project, showing functional architecture, use cases, functional logic and that quality is determined by whether an alternative vendor could use it to reproduce a systems functioning with least 95% level of accuracy
• Ensure that Living System Snapshot, Roadmap and Project History Documentation is updates quarterly covering capacity, utilisation, functional overview, project history, project roadmap and costing
• Ensure that Requirement Analysis and the supply of Functional Specifications to vendors happens for each project and that these:
• Impart an understanding of the problem space
• Provide the business and product objectives of the project
• Give an understanding of where the product and target system are in the context of fulfilling the business objectives
• Provide detailed and specific instruction to the reader in terms of what the target system or component thereof is required to achieve
• Provide an understanding of the environmental and business constraints in achieving a solution to the requirements
• Provide documentation creation and update requirements for the project
• Ensure that Capacity planning for special events or increasing traffic volumes happens with documentation
• Encourage and provide an environment for Innovation and Proof of Concept work where system functionality can be demonstrated to business. This should be done using the multi-skilling of team members where one often needs to write scripts and/or small ad-hoc applications to perform such a demonstration quickly and therefore at the lowest cost
• Ensure that the team always have System Reporting and E2E tests in place and that these are done by the team as much as possible
• Make sure that each system has at least a primary and secondary owner
• In all matters and decisions seek consensus with, and contributions from, as wide a group of stakeholders as possible
• Track all System licensing making sure that MTN is not paying for licensing that is not used.
• Ensure that the capture of Business Requirements and the Analysis thereof takes place and proper Functional Requirements Specifications are produced for all projects

Qualifications

Job Requirements (Education, Experience and Competencies)

Education:

• Minimum of 3-year tertiary qualification in Information Systems or Engineering 
• Master’s advantageous
• Managerial courses will be an advantage
• Fluent in English and language of country preferable

Experience:

• Minimum of 5 years’ managerial experience in a multi-disciplinary IT environment, including, but not limited to, Digital Channel Technologies, CRM, Telecoms Charging Systems Business Intelligence, Integration technologies, application architecture, application management, application design and development, middleware, database management, operations.
• At least 2 years of senior leadership in similar positions, in fast-moving industries
• Good understanding of all aspects of Information Technology Management processes.
• Experience in a telecommunications environment highly preferred