Design Manager at Absa

Job Summary

• Process Design Manager is responsible for leading a portfolio of process design projects across a business area or channel in Absa. She/he acts as a thought partner to senior business leadership, providing specialist advice and guidance. Process Design Manager manages multiple project teams simultaneously and ensures they deliver coherent, world-class customer experience, process efficiency and process excellence to deliver against defined business objectives.
• An ideal Process Design Manager is a recognised process design expert and able to lead teams to provide consistently excellent and creative design solutions. She/he has a track record of driving development and implementation of business strategy through data-driven process decisions and providing insights and direction to business in senior levels. Process Design Manager is an experienced team leader, who is able to oversee multiple large projects simultaneously. She/he is passionate about high quality, outstanding output and developing skills, and capabilities of the people in her/his organisation. 

Experience and understanding of customer design (UX, Service Design, user testing) is beneficial.
Job Description

Accountability: Business alignment and strategy

• Partner with business and channel leadership to create world-class innovative and efficient processes that align with business and channel strategy. Identify opportunities, and provide expert advice on the vision and objectives.
• Continually elevate the quality, cost, and efficiency of experiences, products, and services we design to enable the business to deliver on its objective
• Drive innovation across Absa’s product and process engineering, challenging the existing thinking and limitations to deliver step-change in customer and colleague experience
• Work with customer metrics and measurements to both monitor and manage the quality of process engineering delivery and to create tangible customer insights needed for the decision making
• Stay abreast of industry trends and role players and ensure that RBB is well-positioned to provide competitive and industry-leading Design

Accountability:  Project management

• Plan, lead and guide multiple project teams within the portfolio space, ensuring data-driven approach, focus on the highest impact work, timely delivery of agreed outcomes, and high process design quality
• Lead the teams to apply rigorous analysis and creative insight to create both continuous and step-change improvements in Absa's process efficiencies and effectiveness
• Define the objectives, scope, and deliverables of each project and align with the business to ensure clear project plans and delivery model
• Translate process designs into technical, business, and architecture requirements that account for risk and compliance requirements and technical limitations
• Allocate and monitor process engineering resources to ensure that quality work will be completed on time and within budget. Involve external agencies when appropriate
• Take ownership of the processes within the project and constructively challenge business and technical decisions to ensure the best possible experience for the customer and colleague
• Sign‐ off designs at various milestones, ensuring high quality, consistency, and adherence to design standards
• Actively seek ways to measure the impact of the process design to the customer and business, reporting the insights to the senior management and business stakeholders

Accountability: World-class process design

• Act as a thought leader in Absa, providing insights and advice based on deep expertise in process engineering methodologies (e.g., lean, six Sigma), understanding of new and advanced technologies and global best practice
• Prioritize and design scalable, efficient, effective, cost-efficient processes that deliver significant customer and business value (e.g., experience, cost savings, quality, and resource utilization)
• Deliver projects, which lead to the creation of an industry-leading customer and colleague experience, which is notably different, far exceeds expectations and is at the global forefront of simplicity and usability while still maintaining the depth and richness in the functionality of the Absa product set
• Ensure that end to end business impact of process design is measured, well understood, and articulated. Document and distribute project outputs in such a way that input requirements for downstream  business-, delivery- and embedment partners are met e.g. Operations, Product teams, Technology
• Ensure the teams embrace best practice methodologies, tools, and analysis, and follow best-practice standards in developing process designs

Accountability: People Leadership

• Actively manage the people in the teams, supporting them in prioritization, problem-solving and technical development
• Create a Design office and team environment in which process engineers will thrive, be motivated by, and develop as professionals
• Promote the professional development of the individual designers through one to one mentoring, training, and providing the right opportunities for development
• Actively contribute the overall knowledge management, providing insights and direction; and by bringing people together to share knowledge

Education and experience required

• Engineering qualification (NQF Level 8-10)  or equal work experience; Six Sigma Green Belt required, Six Sigma Black Belt preferred
• 6-10 years’ experience, of which 2-4 years in leading complex, commercial, process design projects involving senior stakeholders
• Proven excellence in technical skills across several process design methodologies (e.g., Reengineering, Lean, Six Sigma), strong understanding of Business and Solution architecture
• Understanding of agile working environment and methodologies
• Demonstrated business acumen required, other commercial or operational business experience advantageous.
• Experience and understanding of customer design (UX, Service Design, user testing) is beneficial.

Education

• Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Physical, Mathematical, Computer and Life Sciences (Required)

Absa Bank Limited is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. In compliance with the Employment Equity Act 55 of 1998, preference will be given to suitable candidates from designated groups whose appointments will contribute towards achievement of equitable demographic representation of our workforce profile and add to the diversity of the Bank.

Absa Bank Limited reserves the right not to make an appointment to the post as advertised