Solution Owner SBG13 (Business and Commercial Banking clients) at Standard Bank Group

Job Purpose

• The Solution Owner role within Everyday Banking focusing on Business and Commercial clients is expected to drive the strategy in achieving (1) digitisation the servicing of clients, to remove friction experienced by clients and staff given manual, paper based and outdated processes or (2) improvement in the cross-sell and entrenchment of transactional capabilities or (3) improvement in the cross-sell and entrenchment of savings and investments or (4) new revenue opportunities by building solutions that integrate with clients business processes
• Accountable for managing the-end-to end flow of all run the bank changes and build of new solutions within an allocated client journey, in line with our growth, entrenchment and digitisation priorities
• Responsible to lead a multi-disciplinary and multi-skilled team to build the selected features / solutions within the client journey across multiple platforms and systems.

Key Accountabilities

Develop and continuously review feature / solution build

• Accountable for the effective build and delivery within agreed timelines of the selected features and solutions in the client journey.
• Understands the IT landscape for the selected journey in order to ensure feasibility of features.
• Facilitates the relationship between feature teams and business leadership / owners, bringing the voice and priorities of the customer to the fore.
• Analyses and interprets the customer and employee data in terms of the feedback received in during the pre- and pilot phase the feature build.
• Continuously ensures that the solution built is aligned to the client journey target state.
• Remains accountable for the client experience as it pertains to the features.

Lifecycle management and maintenance

• Accountable for all run (including portfolio health), production,stability, lifecycle management and maintenance initiatives across multiple platforms, systems, features (e.g. risk exposures, system outages, operational matters that impact client experience, feature changes, etc.), as it pertains to the particular squad and responsibilities.
• Accountable for the continued financial delivery of the solution (including post implementation).
• Drives platform stability and security of the platforms within the journey – alignment with any other run the bank initiatives that may impact the client journey and makes the relevant trade-off decisions.
• Continually modernises platforms and solutions in line with what matters to customers.

Lead teams to deliver features within the client journey

• Effectively lead teams to deliver the solution within the relevant agreed timelines.
• Timeously manages risks and issues that hamper the build and delivery of the solution.
• Prioritises build activities based on business and technical dependencies.
• Effectively manages the flow of the solution build across multiple platforms and systems and entrenches the client journey way of working.
• Ensures the sequencing of the solution build is understood and is a realistic view of the build and delivery of the solution.
• Effectively manages outputs from key stakeholders involved in the solution e.g. User Experience (UX) flow, technical design, User Interface (UI) design, story identification and writing, change management plan, marketing plan, operational metrics, etc.
• Provides accurate and relevant information for input into the business cases.

Deliver solutions across of back, middle and front office and IT systems for the client journey

• Accountable to sequence and prioritise build of the solution in order to deliver against the target state journey aligned to strategic, customer and financial outcomes.
• Works with all relevant internal and external stakeholders to build the appropriate digitised solution in line with what matters to customers as identified by the client focus groups and interviews.
• Ensures the solution prototyping of the UX flow as well as the UI is executed in order for the build to take place.
• Together with IT (e.g., developers) ensures that business objectives are clearly articulated and prioritised for IT build.
• Prioritises the backlog in agreement with the Head, Client Solutions, Business and Commercial clients and ensures that they are actively managed to scope and quality.
• Coordinates and executes the build and delivery of the solution.
• Accountable for managing the business risk and ensures that the build is aligned to risk and compliance requirements.

Communicate stakeholder needs and align with stakeholders

• Ensures alignment between all stakeholders through effective communication.
• Engages with other Solution Owners within other client journeys to ensure alignment.
• Manages the various relationships across all stakeholders that are involved and required to deliver the feature / solution e.g., Compliance, Security Fraud, Audit, etc
• Managers the relationships with all internal stakeholders that are part of the solution.
• Socialises all relevant stakeholders about the solution in order to address any questions and concerns (e.g., risk and compliance).
• Represents the Bank on industry regulated projects as it pertains to the squad deliverables / areas of responsibility.
• Identifies, documents and shares lessons learned with relevant stakeholders to improve knowledge and experience of the solution.  This is done through retrospectives.
• Collaborates with other client journey teams in order to ensure knowledge sharing and building of holistic ecosystem solutions.
• Provides input into Learning and Development (L&D) as required to support the launch of the feature / solution across all channels within SBSA.

Financial outcome

• Overall financial accountability as it pertains to the responsibilities of the squad including target / budget setting, understanding of performance to budgets, unlocking value to deliver on budget commitments.
• Ensures delivery of business and customer value through the feature / solution.
• Assists the Viability Analyst to build the feature / solution business cases
• Demonstrates the impact of the delivery of the feature / solution on cost; revenue; customer and NPS.
• Accountable for ensuring the business case is met once the feature / solution is scaled.
• Accountable to continuously track improvements of the feature / solution.

Risk management

• Takes into account existing policies and procedures when building and testing different features / solutions whilst not incurring additional operational, credit and market risk.
• Ensures that the relevant risk and compliance assessments take place at all stages of the solution development. All new processes / changes to the existing process (before being scaled) must be signed off by the different risk and compliance committees (RCC’s) including sign off from the business partners (for e.g. Operations Shared Services). In particular, ensures that relevant risk items are raised at the Product RCC for approval by the Product quorum.

Scaling of feature / solution

• Works with the change teams to promote the solution with relevant stakeholders (e.g., RBB and the frontline / digital channels).
• Guides the change and Marketing teams to articulate the solution and marketing initiatives required to promote the solution correctly.
• Analyses and interprets feedback received from customer and staff regarding the solution and ensures necessary actions are taken to address issues (e.g., ensuring requirements are built to address these issues in the next iteration).
• Ensures the adoption of the solution with the necessary adoption measures that will be tracked.

People management

• Manages a team to ensure effective delivery of objectives for the area.
• Develops a high performing team by embedding the bank's performance process, regular performance feedback and coaching. Addresses poor performance.
• Motivates team members and ensures that they receive recognition for work well done.
• Determines development needs of the team and ensures that development opportunities (training, rotation, on-the-job learning) are budgeted for and executed.
• Maintains a succession plan for the team by reviewing the skills of the team at least twice a year and has career conversations with them.
• Interviews and recruits new members of the team, including determining the appropriate salary with input from the Human Capital Business Partner.
• Creates workforce plans for the area to ensure that current and future business requirements can be met. Such plans should be revisited at least twice a year.
• Uses workforce plans to obtain headcount approvals on an annual basis and as input into the financial budgeting cycles.
• Creates quarterly leave plans to ensure adequate coverage. Approves leave requests and leave sell requests.
• When required, initiates disciplinary processes for team members. Resolves grievances raised by team members, escalating only if unresolved.

Qualifications

• BSc Comp Science, B.Com Informatics degree and / or business degree

Experience

• 7 – 10 years experience in managing product and solution delivery, delivering business value, managing teams and managing IT projects with multidisciplinary teams. Experience in effectively managing relationships across the value chain to deliver a programme of work. Experience in effectively managing front to back delivery teams i.e. business, specialised functions (SME’s) and IT delivery. Strong business and product background. Strong technical / IT understanding.