Fresh Jobs at Absa Group

Job Summary

• To develop tactical strategy and delivery plans, formulate associated practice/s and to ensure operational implementation and adaption i.t.o. organisational development methodology, governance and delivery objectives.

Job Description
In the context of the back office transformation project, design the new organisation:

• Strategic design: operating model, service delivery model, process catalogue framework
• Organisation design: reporting structure, job profiles supporting the design, job architecture
• Talent strategy: update the job grid, strategic workforce planning, workforce scenarios
• Job architecture, operating model, service delivery model implementation

Education

• Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Business, Commerce and Management Studies (Required)

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Job Summary

Senior Design Director is responsible for driving Absa’s customer and design strategy across a design function or a highly complex strategic area in the organization. She/he acts as a thought partner to senior business leaders in formulating a customer experience strategy and ensures customer thinking is embedded in all decision making. Senior Design Director oversees the multiple design projects in her/his business area and ensures they deliver coherent, world-class customer experience aligned to the business strategy and needs.

An ideal Senior Design Director is an expert in her/his field of design and able to provide consistently excellent and creative design solutions. She/he has a track record of driving development and implementation of business strategy through design decisions and providing insights and direction to the business at senior levels. Senior Design Director is an experienced people leader, who is able to oversee multiple large projects simultaneously. She/he is passionate about high-quality customer design and developing the skills and capabilities of the people in her/his organization. Experience and understanding of process design are beneficial.

Job Description
Accountability: Design Capability development

• Build a Design Centre of Excellence; grow and develop functional design capability by creating new design standards and tools to ensure continuously improving and consistent design quality across the business
• Create an environment of innovation, quality, and ownership within the Design Office
• Support the Head of Design in creating and articulating a wider Design Office strategy to deliver a truly exceptional customer experience across Absa
• Work with customer metrics and measurements to both monitor and manage the quality of design 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: Thought leadership and innovation

• Formulate the channel/BU customer experience strategy to enable the delivery of the business strategy, conceptualize the impact of the strategy to design choices and focus, and specify the appropriate measures for monitor outcomes
• Drive innovation across Absa’s product and solution design, challenging the existing thinking and limitations to deliver step-change in customer experience
• Act as a thought leader to business and channel leadership, providing insights and advice based on deep expertise in design thinking, design solutions, and global best practice
• Deliver the highest quality, creative, and innovative design solutions to highly complex problems, Deliver projects which enable the business to deliver on its customer experience, brand promise, and GoTo strategic agenda.

Accountability: Project management

• Manage a large portfolio of projects, creating innovation and ease of use that delights Absa customers and is also recognized externally as the market-leading design
• Identify synergies across different projects and project portfolios, uplifting the design quality or reducing the effort and time to market for the different solutions
• Drive a great and consistent customer experience across a highly complex area within the bank, with a large number of stakeholders and competing priorities, ensuring focus on highest impact areas and delivery of exceptional outcomes
• Combine the understanding of the business strategic intent and customer insights into tangible project proposals and briefs, with large value-add to the business; support Design Directors and Senior Designers in translating these into project scopes and project plans
• Oversee several simultaneous projects, providing guidance and direction across all, and understand where to dive deeper to ensure great delivery. Engage and inspire entire design project teams.
• Allocate and monitor design resources to ensure that quality work will be completed on time and to budget; involving external design agencies to manage demand when appropriate.

Accountability: People Leadership

• Create a design ecosystem and physical environment in which designers will thrive, be motivated by, and develop as professionals
• Drive the talent pipeline to ensure the right balance of senior and junior talent across different functional skillsets
• Promote the professional development of the individual designers through one to one mentoring, training, and providing the right opportunities for development
• Take ownership of building a best practice knowledge base and processes; and creating programs that grow design knowhow in wider RBB.
• Positively contribute to the Design Community in South Africa

Education

• Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: General (Required)

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Job Summary

The role is primarily responsible for driving the development and execution of a cohesive Design strategy across multiple channels, lead clients and teams through insights, and contribute to all phases of the design process.

Job Description

he Head: Design is primarily responsible for driving the development and execution of a cohesive Design strategy across multiple channels, lead clients and teams through insights, and contribute to all phases of the design process. The role is accountable for identifying problems faced by business/product owners, and ensure effective and efficient business value streams and optimal integration of processes, people and technology by interactively analysing, researching, providing input and recommendations to solution designs initiative across RBB, in line with business strategy.

To act as the ultimate authority of design in RBB to address business problems and needs by defining the overall design landscape from a solutions perspective, ensuring conformity and compliance to standards and guidelines.

Key accountabilities
Accountability: Strategy & business accountability

• Set and communicate a long-term Design strategy that clearly articulates strategic targets and metrics to align the delivery of agreed strategy against the RBB Business strategic objectives and targets and shareholder expectations.
• Outline clear and compelling vision in terms of Design, translating the vision into a set of clear and actionable initiatives
• Stay abreast of industry trends and role players and ensure that RBB is well positioned to provide competitive and industry leading Design.
• Set and communicate a long-term strategy that clearly articulates strategic targets and metrics to align the delivery of the function’s targets against the Bank’s strategic objectives and targets and shareholder expectations.

Accountability: Customer Experience (CX) Design

• Deliver projects, which lead to the creation of an industry leading customer experience that is notably different, far exceeding expectations and is at the global forefront of simplicity and usability while still maintaining the depth and richness in functionality of the Absa product set.
• Leverage insight and data to ensure that products/services/solutions are designed around the customer/client/colleague.
• Establish a CX strategy that will guide the principles for CX application in the short and medium term –leveraging the global team where appropriate.
• Design, develop and deliver through integrated teams, ongoing customer experience improvements as well as innovations, which provide Absa/Barclays with sources of significant differentiation and competitive advantage.
• Review and approve the output of the design and technical teams to ensure that the planned user experience is achieved during implementation.
• Work collaboratively to elicit and document functional requirements and prioritisation from business stakeholders through workshops and relevant documentation while tracking implementation delivery and reporting on progress.

Accountability: User Interface (UI) & User Experience (UX)

• Design Defining, building and running a successful, world-class design team, typically responsible for:
• Determining and setting the optimal design approach for projects from ideation to final design implementation
• Documenting personas and journey maps, site-mapping, wire-framing, prototyping, user-testing, visual assets, front-end code etc.
• Creating a design ecosystem and physical environment in which designers will thrive, be motivated by and develop as professionals.
• Instructing and managing agencies to ensure quality, value for money and effective working relationships.
• Managing stakeholders and the department to ensure all things finance/governance/resource related are handled.
• Allocating and monitoring of design resource to ensure that quality work will be completed on time and to budget; involving external design agencies to manage demand when appropriate.
• Closely directing designers who are driving day-to-day design detail. Engage and inspire entire design project teams.
• Ensuring projects remain on course and reach the highest standards of design that create innovation and user value.
• Providing updates and presenting final designs to senior Absa/Barclays leadership alongside to project team.
• Keep abreast of developments within area of expertise, reading internal circulars, bulletins, etc. and implement training interventions to ensure imparting of skills and understanding.

Accountability: Business Process Design Outputs to deliver this accountability:

• Responsible for identifying problems faced by business/product owners, and ensure effective and efficient business value streams and optimal integration of processes, people and technology by interactively analysing, researching, providing input and recommendations to solution designs initiative across RBB, in line with business strategy.
• Act as a strategic consultant to executive management on the alignment of business processes to the technical and information enterprise architecture, and on the alignment of business processes in line with strategic business needs.
• Work with the Enterprise Architecture team to ensure alignment between the business process architecture and all relevant technology architectures (applications, data and infrastructure).
• Engage and build relationships with product and process owners, to understand the requirements, inputs, handoffs and outputs of the process, and ensure that sufficient process analysis is conducted in order to meet desired business needs.
• Support process owners to design change impact assessment tools and change project plans.
• Champion and lead process improvement, analysis and business process management functions – either as standalone projects or as part of wider programmes of change.

Accountability: Design Research Outputs to deliver this accountability:

• Provide subject matter expertise and training in user research. Work with project teams to identify research needs, design learning plans, research materials and tests, Guides execution of research activities on projects
• Provide analysis of research related data with actionable recommendations
• Coordinates with internal and external resources where appropriate to maximize existing work and expertise
• Evangelize social research methodologies and approaches across project teams to empower every team member to increase their awareness of user needs
• Maintain awareness of relevant social, cultural, economic and technological trends
• Teach design thinking and research best practices to other team members
• Work with a variety of experts to provide breakthrough insights based on the analysis and synthesis of user needs, corporate strategies, enterprise capabilities and market opportunities
• Partner with others in the innovation development strategy – connecting new concepts to the current business

Team Leadership and People Management Outputs to deliver this accountability:

• Drive senior management thinking, debate and influence, to drive and manage transformational change.
• Facilitate, support and guide the delivery and achievement of business team results in a balance scorecard of customer / company / colleague / community.
• Oversee the management of business managers and engagements with clients.
• Proactively build and maintain relationship with key stakeholders across RBB and looking for opportunities to leverage and build cross BU solutions.
• Provide leadership and coaching to ensure that all colleagues are aligned to the goals and culture of RBB.
• Rigorously discharge all Group HR policies (including Performance Development, Equality and Diversity, Disciplinary & Grievance) in respect of staff under scope.
• Ensure and maintain a succession plan for the key roles and review/approve succession plans in the operating environment.
• Manage and develop performance through the ongoing implementation of the performance development process within Transformation and Change and review alignment between performance ratings and business results.
• Managing the recruitment process with the Resourcing team resolving issues and tracking overall progress of hiring activity.
• Participate in coaching and mentoring activities, particularly for candidates in the graduate programme and for identified talent development within the business.
• Actively manage the workplace environmental elements and their impact on staff motivation, retention as well as health and safety.
• Manage consistently poor performers.

Role/Person specification
Education and Experience:

• Bachelor’s Degree (NQF Level 7) in Design/Digital/Commerce/Engineering/Business Administration/Information Systems.
• MBA or similar post-graduate qualifications preferred.
• Has at least 15+ years’ post qualification experience directing complex, commercial, design projects
• Deep aptitude and knowledge within business architecture/process architecture
• A design practitioner background and foundation within one or more disciplines.
• Familiar with designing product, services and experiences across multiple touch points.
• Has worked with large budgets and major brands.
• Preferably a leading, established and respected figure within the design industry and community.
• Deep aptitude and knowledge within business architecture/process architecture
• Expertise in strategy development, planning and execution.

Knowledge & Skills:

• Detailed understanding of strategic agenda and ability to influence stakeholders at various level including communication and presentation skills.
• Knowledge of customer/digital/service/product/process design.
• Highly creative with the ability to generate ideas and practically contribute to design details.
• Ability to communicate ideas through digital tools, prototyping, model making etc.
• Ability to inspire others.
• Ability to influence stakeholders at all levels, particularly at RBB Exco level.

Competencies:

• Strategic Capability
• Business Acumen
• Customer Focus
• Results Orientation
• Innovation Leadership
• Problem Solving Leadership
• Inspirational People Leadership
• Collaboration and Influencing

Education

• Bachelor`s Degrees and Advanced Diplomas: Business, Commerce and Management Studies (Required)