Practice Manager: Research & Development and Technical Enablement at Standard Bank Group

Job description

Standard Bank is a firm believer in technical innovation, to help us guarantee exceptional client service and leading edge financial solutions. Our digital footprint reflects our commitment to the latest solutions, the best people, and a uniquely flexible and vibrant working culture. To help us drive our success into the future, we are looking for a Practice Manager for theResearch & Development and Technical Enablement practices to drive the software quality engineering journey forward.

There are two primary facets to this role. The first, building the practice, is about acquiring (hiring), training and developing top class managers and technical experts. The second is about defining, implementing and evolving the set of methods, practices, guidelines and frameworks that are required in order to continually improve the quality of technical solutions that are delivered.

Key Responsibilities/Accountabilities:

• Responsible for constructing the teams within the practice:
• Ensures a common sense of purpose by establishing the vision, intent and desired outcomes of the practices.
• Drive the New ways of work (agile at scale) model to ensure the organisation is moving forward from a People, process and Technology perspective.
• Drive change and ensure that teams are comfortable with change whilst driving new practices.
• Drive a culture of entrepreneurship and ensuring that we have a self-motivated organisation that thrives on solving complex problems.
• Hires skilled managers and top class technical experts (Quality Managers and Quality Engineers).
• Ensures an appropriate supply of technical experts to fill available positions in the delivery portfolios (SAFe Portfolio, Program and Team levels).
• Builds relationships with the team, partners and the broader industry.
• Management of the teams specifically through Performance management and career development:
• Continually improves his/her own technical acumen and remains closely connected to changes in industry practices.
• Provides support in the form of training, mentoring, coaching, etc. for practice team members to allow them to attain mastery in their craft.
• Provides opportunities for team members to acquire adjacent skills (“T-shaped employees”) and actively drives cross skilling as a strategic initiative.
• Sets measurable goals and objectives and provides explicit guidance w.r.t. performance expectations.
• Measures performance continually (using feedback from a wide variety of sources) and provides honest and objective feedback to team members on a regular basis.
• Sets clear expectations for the achievement of quality goals.
• Encourages autonomy of decision making within clearly defined boundaries.
• Ensures that team members are rewarded fairly within the context of experience, performance and personal contribution.
• Build and improve capability to ensure effectiveness of the practice against industry
• Through collaboration with team members, industry, community, subject matter experts, research houses, etc. establishes and continually improves the standards, methods, frameworks, etc. for the “way things are done” i.e., the way solutions are architected, designed, built and operated.
• Ensures that Security forms an integral part of all practice capabilities.
• Works with key stakeholders (e.g., Product managers) to ensure that work required to instantiate practice goals and objectives is properly prioritised and inserted into Portfolio/Program/Team backlogs.
• Has extreme focus on building capability that produces predictable, reliable and sustainable solutions. “Everything under version control” & “Automate all things”.
• Drives a culture of relentless improvement.
• Regularly assesses the effectiveness of the practice against industry leaders.
• Does presentations at industry functions and actively contributes to the industry body of knowledge.
• Encourages the use of rituals and habits that help shape the effectiveness of the practice.
• Creates Guilds (“communities of practice”) to encourage in-and-across-practice collaboration, information sharing, etc.
• Drive the effective management of the Financials
• Lead and drive initiatives around benefits realisation related to the overall practice/functions landscape.
• Formulate and gain acceptance for annual revenue and capital budgets for the business unit/practice
• Monitor budgets against expenditure and manage IT costs in line with organisational parameters
• Ensure necessary transparency and controls are in place regarding expenditure within the function/practice
• Sets the strategy for the practice/functions resource management to respond to business priorities cost effectively.
• Authorise at functional level the allocation of resources for the planning, development and delivery, as appropriate, of services and products
• Manages all Audits, Risks & Compliance requirements to ensure adherence to regulations
• Crafts a risk management plan for the practices (incl. business continuity).
• Implements requisite risk elimination / mitigation solutions and continually tracks risks and issues.
• Works with partners from Group Information Security to ensure that best practice security standards are embedded into all practice capabilities.
• Ensures that practice capability (process, methods, tools, etc.) are compliant with Internal Audit requirements.
• Full responsibility for practice or functions end to end delivery including objectives key results, budget, quality, feasibility and sustainability
• Assist the business to interpret, evaluate and apply technology opportunities. Can evangelise new technologies/standards that will have a positive impact on the company’s bottom-line and quality of service.

Preferred Qualification and Experience:

• Matric
• National Diploma in IT / Computer Systems
• BS/MS degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related subject
• More than 10 years Proven working experience in software development Life Cycle
• More than 10 years Proven working experience in software quality assurance
• More than 10 years Strong knowledge of software QA methodologies, tools, and processes
• 5-7 Years Banking industry experience, preferably in Retail / Business Banking
• 5-7 Years Experience in Agile testing implementation with respect to tools and techniques.
• Experience in implementation of CI/CD across the technologies.
• More than 10 years Experience with scripting language such as Java/Shell/Ruby. Any development experience in baking technologies. Played an Architect or development manager role played earlier.
• 3-4 Years Experience working in an Agile/Scrum development process

Knowledge/Technical Skills/Expertise:

• DevOps Adoption and CI/CD:
• Lead evaluation of QA tools for Agile and DevOps adoption and CI/ CD implementation for Quality Engineering across all the Feature Teams in the bank.
• Principle and Standard:
• Define the principles for automated test environment provisioning using tools and define principles for version management, integration of automated test cases.
• Metrics & Improvement
• Define quality engineering metrics to measure velocity of Automated script development and execution. Also identify the strategy to improve YoY.
• Leadership:
• Responsible for leading and directing the practices in scope.
• Monitoring & Improvement
• Ensuring that the Feature and development teams and Quality Engineering teams align and adhere to the principles, guidelines and best practices of the automated QA strategy.
• Training & Development
• Manage training and continuous learning of QE staff by means of short courses, conferences, meetups, certifications, etc.
• Provide technical expertise in test automation, testing methodologies, testing processes, tools and techniques across the teams.
• Identify the right technical skills requirements based on various technology and current scope of testing.
• Identify the latest happening around the world and bring that expertise skills with in the team by identifying the right level of training and measurement.

Competencies:

• Self-Motivated and driven
• Thought Leadership
• Team player
• Strategic and Critical Thinking

Technical Competencies:

• Business Process Improvement
• Business Analysis
• Organisational Change Management
• Stakeholder Management
• Research and Info Gathering
• Trouble Shooting Ability
• IT knowledge
• Benefits Management