Position: Digital Services Manager
Location: Applications accepted from our hub locations in Nairobi, Lagos, Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, Botswana or London.
Line manager: Director, Digital Services
Type of contract: Full-time, Permanent & Pensionable
Africa Practice is a strategic advisory firm, operating at the nexus of industry and government. We supply insights and advocacy solutions to corporations, investors, governments and foundations in Africa, enabling them to unlock value to drive sustainable and equitable development.
About the role
Africa Practice’s digital solutions provide our clients with data driven insights, actionable intelligence and smart engagement capability. Our class leading stakeholder management platform – InGauge – is used by leading companies and governments across the continent. We are committed to growing and developing our digital portfolio, alongside our established consulting practice, to provide clients with a world class user experience across all touch-points and support their transformation journey.
This is an exciting opportunity to be at the centre of our company and network, working closely with our Digital Services Director (DSD) and our small but brilliant digital team, to bring user experience and high quality digital services to everything we do; continuously improving our information environment and ways of working, providing our consultants with user-centric apps and services and creating world class solutions for our clients.
Job Description
Technical infrastructure, support and services
- Maintain and administer our cloud platforms, infrastructure and core technologies.
- Provide second line technical support for Africa Practice and client users, escalating as necessary.
- Maintain strong working relationships with technical suppliers and partners, helping the DSD to evaluate, procure and manage these relationships.
- Manage the product roadmap for digital solutions, including hands on management of external technical delivery teams as appropriate.
- Help to establish, maintain and drive best practice information security and management standards and policies across the group.
‘Internal’ digital services and knowledge management
- Work closely with DSD, digital champions and other stakeholders to design, prototype and roll out user centric systems and services to underpin our world class consulting capability.
- Build understanding and awareness of digital best practices, design thinking and agile management approaches.
- Monitor and promote adoption of digital services through a combination of hands on training, rich media user guidance and by helping to upskill our team of digital champions.
Client facing digital solutions
- Work closely alongside AP consultants to evaluate client requirements and assess the potential and fit for digital solutions whether as an adjunct to consulting services or through SaaS.
- Collaborate with all stakeholders to design, pitch, promote and deliver digital solutions, supporting roll outs and adoption by clients.
Skills and Experience
- Our ideal candidate will be a true digital native; creative and hands on with a passion for everything new and good the connected world has to offer.
- You will be collaborative, solution-focused, organised, analytical and great with people – with the ability to influence and build relationships across the organisation.
- Confident training and supporting a distributed network of people to use and understand digital tech.
- Experience of administering digital products and services in a corporate setting, especially in a lean / agile environment.
- Comfortable with design thinking and visual thinking approaches – supporting multidisciplinary teams to design, prototype and test ideas in a user centric and insight driven way.
- Demonstrable experience as part of a software delivery team, as an engineer, data scientist, digital project manager, or UX designer.
- Awareness, exposure and interest in working to best international quality standards across all aspects of our information systems and our software development and deployment practices.
Specific skills : highly desirable
- Agile project management, e.g. scrum, kanban
- Digital product management : user centred design, user experience design, backlog creation, user stories, user journey creation
- Professional services automation
- Development : Laravel, php, javascript, html 5, css3; other scripting languages e.g. Google script and visual libraries e.g. Vue.js, D3.js
- Devops : managing github or other code repo; server administration, deployment automation
- Administration of cloud platforms e.g. Google Suite, Google Cloud Platform, Salesforce, AWS, Azure
- Rapid application development : e.g. Google App Maker, MS Power Apps, Salesforce Lightning.
- Corporate information and knowledge management: information architecture, content strategy, user community management.
If Interested please click the ‘Apply’ button. For an informal chat ping Steen Joffe via Linkedin
