Head of Centre of Excellence

Who are we?

Experian gathers, analyses and processes data in ways others can't. We help individuals take financial control and access financial services, businesses make smarter decisions, lenders lend more responsibly, and organizations prevent identity fraud and crime. Our 17,800 people in 45 countries believe the possibilities for you, and our world, are growing. We're investing in new technologies, talented people and innovation so we can help create a better tomorrow.

What do we have to offer?

Not only do we offer our employees a competitive benefits package and flexibility to have a good work life balance. We offer you an exciting, challenging environment where you get the opportunity to work in an international team and continuously learn and develop your technical and soft skills.

Job Purpose

As the Head of Centre of Excellence, you will provide direction, thought leadership and head a team of Lead and Functional delivery and testing staff as they implement Experian decisioning and ID&F hosted and cloud solutions. The Head of Centre of Excellence will be responsible for providing project resources for the portfolio of projects identified and managed by the DA Resource Management and Project Management teams (under the PPMO organization); providing leadership, guidance, escalation, and staff and team recruiting, training, and career pathing. The Head of Centre of Excellence will also be responsible for establishing processes for implementing for monitoring project and staff performance, client satisfaction, staff training programs, vertical knowledge, and Communities of Practice.

Responsibilities Include

• Establish Product and Technical teams who are responsible for all phases of delivery and testing for DA decisioning and ID&F projects.  Establish goals, performance targets and KPI’s.
• Project implementation. Overall accountability for successful delivery project implementation.  Success criteria should be further defined to include overall and individual project team member implementation performance; quality of product and technical results; team collaboration and participation in moving project through to a successful completion; communication of issues and opportunities; and adherence to corporate policy.
• Oversee various engagements concurrently with aggressive timelines. This includes outlining and ensuring coordination including implementation objectives, issues, findings and recommendations in a variety of client situations.
• Service Acceptance.  PPMO and Delivery teams to coordinate with DA Support, take the lead in structuring service acceptance activities in order to support acceptance of Client delivery projects into Service, avoiding any client deployment delays and EBIT erosion.
• Project oversight and improvement. Working with PPMO, guide or participate, where necessary, in project technical governance board.  Maintain reporting and lead timely and actionable feedback for improvement.  Manage daily activities, issue resolution and communication across project execution teams to deliver projects on-time, on-budget, as-requested by customer.
• Communities of Practice.  Sponsor and champion for developing and growing the engagement and impact of Communities of Practice.  Select participants, set up rotation of staff for participation; document purpose and governance; and provide timely feedback to questions and issues raised by Community members. 
• Knowledge Management/Reusable methodologies.  Develop and maintain knowledge tools and content for problem-solving, development of reusable content and general knowledge-sharing among the communities. 
• Procedures and Process standardization.  Develop necessary procedures which will standardize processing among DA CoE Teams and make automation a logical next step.
• Technology adoption. Provide strategic leadership of DA EMEA efforts to actively promote adoption of technology and tools to improve timeliness and efficiency of delivery project implementations.
• Quality Assurance: Standardising Testing Practices across all of the CoE Teams to drive reliability and quality of outcome whilst also optimising the cost base. 
• Upskilling and career management.  As part of the Communities of Practice, utilising skills gap analysis, develop and implement plans for upskilling team members for improved service and effectiveness.
• Drive the cloud / PaaS strategy for all EMEA markets. Working with all EMEA DA teams, develop plan to ready CoE teams for future legacy conversions and cloud product deliveries.
• In Problem management: Make sure the root cause analysis is properly conducted, including deeper analysis techniques such as “5 why’s”, and ensure that appropriate steps are taken to mitigate the risk of future occurrences. Prepare regular reports and update to executive team.  Support team in Planning and consulting with customers on business process improvements to configure the system features/functions to client requirements and needs.
• Capacity planning: in collaboration with Resource Management, develop tools and processes to provide for capacity planning to facilitate timely and flexible assignment of project resources, as well as addresses the strategic needs of EMEA DA product introductions.  Collaborate with Global Delivery for current cloud delivery resources, ensuring that all upskilling is happening as needed and agreed to.  
• Client Satisfaction: Working with other DA teams, review and ensure high ratings on Client surveys and the overall NPS survey (where possible).  Establish and promulgate service expectations and disseminate survey results.  Include this in staff reviews where possible.  Responsible for managing Customer Satisfaction KPIs in all stages of the project.

Required Key Skills (Functional/Technical)

• Service Delivery experience
• Strong Customer Service Skills
• Excellent Stakeholder Management and communication skills up to Exec Level – written and verbal.
• Experience of identifying, managing, and delivering Continual Service Improvement and Knowledge Share
• Experience managing and adhering to SLA commitments to support existing and new services
• Experience of managing/attending Client-facing Delivery Reviews and reporting both written and verbally to clients.
• Knowledge of service delivery software and workflow
• Excellent analytical skills, with the ability to diagnose and address issues of technical nature (hardware, software and network)
• Ability to analyse, report and review Service performance.  BI tool dashboard and reporting design and implementation
• Experience with Agile processes and SCRUM teams

Other Skills

• Emotional Intelligence
• Ownership and Commitment
• Servant Leadership
• Risk Management
• Learning Agility

Experience and Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Operations, Finance and Banking, Software Development, or related experience.
• 10+ years of relevant experience in complex commercial software implementation, with emphasis on cloud-based products (i.e. SaaS, PaaS).
• Implementation team management, with demonstrated ability to develop and guide high performance teams through complex platform and/or cloud product implementations.
• Strong understanding of internal and Client-focused software user requirements and security and risk management.
• Strong process orientation in a project or related implementation environment.
• Project management experience a plus.
• Practical understanding of ITIL and other IT management frameworks.
• Knowledge of decisioning and ID&F products and how they are being utilized within Client environments.
• Proven technical and thought leadership, with a demonstrated ability to implement changes for continuous improvement.
• Understanding of and desire to build active and agile Communities of Practice.
• Exceptional verbal and written communication skills, and ability to communicate effectively at all corporate levels and with customers.
• Ability to handle multiple competing priorities and workstreams in a fast-paced environment.
• Strong experience collaborating with product/software development teams, and an understanding of the product development lifecycle.