Associate Director – Practice Lead at BDO South Africa

BDO Digital Advisory is looking for a Practise Lead to join their division. The Practise Lead will drive and implement strategy, revenue generation and business growth for the Digital Advisory. Focus on the management and delivery of client engagements, as well as sales and practice development.The Practise Lead will focus on working with our leading clients and their executive teams to design and define innovative business solutions to respond to disruption, design the journey to transition from the current to the future business and establish transformation programs, products and services that drive growth and deliver long term value. You will collaborate with partners across the firm and across geographies to ensure a holistic and cross-functional, transformative approach.

Main Duties and Responsibilities:
Sets Strategy and drives delivery excellence for technology solutions

Ability to lead client through end-to-end design and delivery of forward looking, holistic, and business-aligned Technology solutions

Owns end-to-end delivery of enterprise-level technology and Technology programs, including requirements, supporting strategies and architectures, and appropriately manages and mitigates risks across the program

Understanding the interlinks between the sub-offerings at a technical level in order to enhance market presence

Adopts a holistic view when recommending solutions, leveraging leading practices to align technology solutions with business strategy and specific industry issues

Anticipates risks, opportunities, and broader organizational implications of proposed recommendations, and proactively define mitigating solutions

Leads stakeholders in building executive-level support and organizational buy-in to help enable and sustain the proposed programs

Builds a brand within a chosen domain and industry and is regarded internally and externally as a subject matter expert

Stays current on market trends and regulations, and anticipates risk / opportunities; advises client accordingly

Sales and Business Development

Identify and engage with potential customers and business partners through direct meetings while leveraging existing relationships and building new relationships with strategic partners and individuals

Support analysis and targeting of sales efforts through customer segmentation and profiling

Grow our current client footprint by actively hunting new clients and opportunities

Represent BDO in various forums (e.g., conferences, symposiums, customer visits) and impart detailed information about BDO’s technology and digital capabilities;

Lead the creation of new-business proposals and presentations that create and nurture opportunities and partnerships and showcases BDO’s value proposition.

Preparing all documentation required for requests for proposals (RFPs).

Use BDO and industry data to identify trends and customer needs, and to build and secure a sales pipeline focused on meeting short/medium/long term domain targets

Developing solution strategies

Support marketing stakeholders in the coordination and implementation of marketing strategies

Business Case Development

Provide input into the product vision and roadmap for Digital Advisory by aligning to BDO’s overall company strategy, commercial business unit requirements and key opportunities

Communicate vision and roadmap to stakeholders to ensure buy in, support and clarity on direction and execution

Collaborate with key business stakeholders to define requirements and establish priorities for the product team based on business objectives and strategy

Optimize and continuously improve the experience and the value derived from of the products, journeys and services delivered by the product team through ongoing analysis of customer feedback, user / journey analytics and innovation

Product Development Oversight

Participate in the conceptual solution design process to make recommendations to create and enhance solutions that are innovative, scalable, and sustainable and solve complex business problems.

Participate in User Acceptance testing and guide users to ensure that the designed solution ultimately meets business requirements.

Participate in the success/acceptance criteria definition using scenario testing and test cases to ensure that testing covers all aspects of the business specification.

Validate the functionality of all technical solutions in line with business requirements on completion of development to ensure that business requirements are met in the implemented solutions.

Quality Management

Ensure that projects are delivered within the agreed timelines and in accordance with agreed quality standards and comply with the BDO solutions policy, data protection policy and Information security policies.

Consider and recommend enhancements for project performance and processes and initiate remedial action where defects are evident

Stakeholder Management

Manage relationships with external clients and ensure we grow successful relationships that yield profitable accounts

Be an active member of the BDO digital and technology sounding board, contribute digital transformation ideas that are scalable to be deployed to the existing BDO client base and the rest of Africa

Report to BDO Advisory leadership monthly on the Digital Advisory team’s performance, status of projects and innovation

Engage with audit teams and gather and interpret any requirements that they may have based on a pain points experienced on their audits that can be digitized.

Provide insights on any new technologies that may launch via communication with teams directly or through Marketing channels

Act as a liaison between key stakeholders such as audit technical and the quality enablement team to ensure that digital and technology solutions that are being developed makes business sense and will either save our teams time

Budget Management

Prepare forecasts and budget for the Digital Advisory business unit

Manage and optimize the budget, ensuring all expenditure is in line with the agreed budgets for the Digital Advisory business.

Manage own client account/s within approved budget and profitability targets

Guide and assist other managers on how to manage their client accounts with regards to approved budget

Qualifications, Recognition of Prior Learning, Work Experience, and Knowledge

Qualifications/Recognition of Prior Learning equivalent

Honours degree in information technology, information systems, computer science or related fields

Certifications and continuing education preferred

Work Experience

Minimum 10 years’ experience working in IT.

Minimum 8 years’ experience overseeing IT teams and technology implementations.

Knowledge

Sound understanding of computer systems, networks, security, telecommunications, databases and storage systems.

Solid working knowledge of all relevant coding languages and security protocols.

Skills

Strong interpersonal, communication and leadership skills.

Ability to manage and prioritize tasks and projects.

Excellent analyctical and problem-solving skills

Team oriented

Competencies: Technical & Behavioural

Behavioural Competencies

Good analytical and problem solving skills

Ability to lead teams

Excellent oral and written communication skills

Excellent planning and organisational ability

Attention to detail

BDO Core Competencies

Relationships and Collaboration

Exceptional Client Service

Business Growth

Engaging people

Leadership

Quality, Risk management and Operational performance