Solution Designer at Hollard Insurance

Job Advert Summary    
The Solution Designer is tasked to proactively communicate and collaborate with internal business units and external business partners to analyse information needs and functional requirements. It requires working with stakeholders to understand their needs and goals and translating those into definitions, scenarios, and quality of service requirements. This role is also responsible of managing expectations of the system functions, representing the user experience and looking out for the interests of the users and sponsors of the various projects. The Solution Designer is also responsible to design the appropriate solution to ensure functional and technical fit with the target application and to coordinate with the Architects where necessary, as well as to advise the business of the proposed solution as well as documenting such solutions. This role will have the overall responsibility of solution design for the various solutions following accepted SDLC standards. This role will also entail maintaining up to date documentation for related application tools for project reference and will act as a subject matter expert of the key applications used by the business. Overall the final solutions delivered must be of a world class quality and considered as industry leading. This role will focus on new change requests submitted for deployment and will include managing the change throughout the SDLC, coordinating with the respective teams required for successful deployment

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• A Solution Designer is an excellent communicator and feels comfortable interacting with stakeholders at various levels. His/her primary priority is increasing the velocity of change combined with enhancing customer experience by proper facilitation of solution design knowledge between users, development teams, and testing teams
• Increase velocity of change
• Help promote use of digital services (quoting tools, Pet Portal, digital fulfilment, eClaims, etc) by understanding all the relevant applications and business processes as well as the business challenges and requirements
• Support our brand partners by ensuring a clear understanding of their key objectives and challenges
• Support the completion of projects from a solution design perspective
• Ensuring all changes to systems and applications are well defined through solid business requirements (functional and non-functional) and solid solution design by applying industry standard solution design principles
• Vendor management. Engage with our vendors to assist with delivery, management and tracking of requests and managing priorities
• Allow the business to progress with their objectives and KPI’s by supporting them with industry standard solution design principles
• Define and maintain a continuous improvement philosophy for your domain which supports both technology and business strategy, including
• Delivering an exceptional customer experience
• Driving simplicity and efficiency
• Highly available, stable and scalable services
• Constantly follow up on international trends and practices concerning solution design as well as local insurance industry groups
• Providing application and solution functional knowledge to solve complex business challenges
• Build strong relationships and work collaboratively to strengthen business requirements across all business units and to our external partners
• Providing functional training and knowledge sessions to the IT team
• Support the quality and manage expectations in creating, modifying and/or following existing processes related to solution design
• Contribute towards risk awareness and risk management initiatives
• Is either a pet parent or a parent advocate that can step into our customers’ shoes whenever providing support in the form of business processes, requirements gathering, solution design and/or recommending insights
• Manage change requests allocated to IT throughout the SDLC
• Gain a sound understanding of all application systems critical to the business

Required Knowledge and Experience    
Essential

• The ability to work with stakeholders to identify objectives, opportunities, and potential benefits available and explain or translate complex models and findings to business stakeholders with the ability to influence and champion change
• Well-developed commercial, financial management and communication skills; communicating across a diverse range of stakeholders, in written and verbal forums
• Experience working with Agile Software Development life cycle
• Results oriented
• Understanding and application of change management principles
• Work autonomously and as part of a team
• Ability to work on and deliver multiple initiatives concurrently
• The ability to work within and apply structure to an unstructured environment
• Gathering and documentation of business requirements, functional specifications and non-functional specifications
• Providing world class solution designs by following solution design principles
• Define solution designs to meet the identified business requirements.
• Develop and implement project communication plans, user training and other activities associated with change management.
• Advocating and driving the need for internal change towards industry best practice across the entire SDLC
• Mentoring and up skilling of junior staff

Desirable

• Administrative skills in Jira, such as, Creating Workflow and Screen schemes, Project and board setup, Writing JQL Queries, etc
• Excellent project management and organizational skills
• Ensure teams are formed with the right mix of resources to ensure backlogs can be successfully completed, and ensuring rotation occurs to maximise knowledge management, diversity of work, and staff satisfaction

Educational Requirements    

• Strong solution design skills
• Specific exposure to the Insurance domain
• Knowledge and skills in process re-engineering
• Experience working in geographically distributed teams
• Strong understanding of agile Scrum practices (e.g., sprints, estimation, prioritization, burndown tracking, release planning/scoping) and the Full System Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
• Degree graduate with relevant degree in IT

Closing Date: 19th, March 2022