Head, Program Delivery at Standard Bank Group

JOB PURPOSE

The Innovation Program Delivery Lead, is responsible for ensuring that Innovation programs and projects are planned, managed, and governed in a consistent, transparent, and disciplined manner. The position requires an experienced program management professional with the right mix of relevant experience and skills, an ability to flex between the strategic and the tactical, outstanding verbal and written communication skills, and a high level of energy and flexibility to get things done and thrive in a fast-paced, team-oriented product development environment.

The role holder will be a program management leader who embodies Stanbic’s and indeed Standard Bank Group’s leadership principles of continuous innovation, acting decisively, executing with speed, collaborating effectively (working in teams) and communicating openly.

In this role, s(he) will manage technical program/project managers, assigned to Innovation programs by the Agile Project office, to deliver critical, customer facing, enterprise software development projects that drive our new revenue streams and capability ambitions, towards our 2025 ambition to become a platform based, client centric financial services business. S(he) will lead efforts to improve our processes, making our teams, including product owners (ecosystem leads and execution managers), highly productive and champion the adoption of best practice.

As the Innovation program leader, the role holder will build and maintain strong internal relationships, fostering collaboration across innovation, client segments, client solutions engineering and corporate functions. The role holder’s ability to work across functions and teams will allow him/her to ensure alignment of priorities and goals, drive results and foster a culture and environment to achieve excellence and innovation.

KEY RESPONSIBILITES

Innovation Program Delivery

• Provide leadership and oversight in planning, execution and delivery of the Innovation Solutions Roadmap including managing the software lifecycle; creating, iterating and continuous improvements
• Work with Business and executive sponsors to develop roadmaps for solutions in Innovation’s portfolio that align with business objectives/priority and take into account resource availability/allocation
• Oversight the end-to-end delivery of innovation solutions in collaboration with product owners (ecosystem leads and execution managers), innovation solutions delivery leads and engineering teams, both in market and SBG as well as partner organisations, reporting on progress, ensuring dependencies are proactively outlined and covered
• Accountable for regular innovation portfolio reviews and use of strong technical and business acumen to manage risk and address escalated impediments
• Define and organize solution delivery, outline tenets, analyse data, drive performance improvements, and influence resource allocation for all stages of execution (from ideation to delivery)
• Be the scrum master for the innovation team, across ecosystem leads, ecosystem execution managers and solution delivery leads. Removes blockers and always find the path forward in challenging situations both in programs delivery, route to market and commercialization
• Cultivate operational excellence within the Innovation team and partners by enforcing consistency and standardized processes; creating an environment of consistent excellence, innovation and designing to the edge
• Drive improvements in software development practices/processes and overall program delivery within innovation and indeed, across the organization
• Executive program reporting on an Adhoc, weekly and monthly basis & drive continuous improvement of success metrics

People

• Collaboration and teamwork: working with others to collectively solve problems and share ideas, fostering a healthy and stimulating work environment
• Relationship management: building rapport with internal and external stakeholders at executive and other levels and capacities, both technical and non-technical, influencing and motivating a singular drive towards a successful program outcomes, and managing stakeholder expectations
• Responsible for coaching and mentoring of the innovation team and beyond on Agile/Scrum/Lean principles and practices

Risk, Regulatory, Prudential & Compliance

• Recommend and execute improvements in solutions in accordance with the Risk and Compliance guidelines

QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelors or Master’s degree with a STEM focus (Science, Technology, Engineering or Math). MBA is a plus.
• 10+ years of relevant work experience in either Program, Project or Portfolio management
• Previous experience in managing a large portfolio of projects (over $10 million)
• 5+ years of technical leadership experience ideally from a development or test engineering background
• 5+ years of experience hiring, training, mentoring and managing project teams
• Project Management Professional (PMP®) certification is strongly preferred.
• PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP®), Certified ScrumMaster (CSM),Scaled Agile Framework Program Consultant (SAFe SPC) and/or Lean Six Sigma certifications also preferred.
• Strong knowledge of Jira and other planning tools
• Experience with payment processing, financial systems and online/ecommerce
• Experience working with partners, both onsite and offshore on large scale and complex projects