Head of Portfolio And Applications - IT - HSBC Egypt

Role Purpose:

Accountable for the country portfolio, delivery of projects, all local IT services’ management, and people management responsibilities of service owners, engineers, self-service equipment support, core banking analysis and Cloud portfolio review and assessment.

Principal Accountabilities:

Impact on the Business/Function:

• Maintain an ongoing relationship with the Business as required to streamline the Order-book and deliver assigned projects in a timely, cost effective manner with maximum business benefit.
• Manage relationships at a senior level with the business.
• Manage Demand & Supply to ensure ‘right’ projects are progressed for the right customers.
• Driving sustainable growth. Develop the IT sub-function responsibly, engaging with colleagues across the IT sub-function and wider to deliver sustainable operational plans in line with department strategy.

Customers / Stakeholders:

• Stay abreast of technology trends and advise IT and the business about potential benefits/impacts
• Manage the overall Egypt technology projects’ portfolio including scope, risks, controls, planning, implementation and budget.
• Manage demand & supply to ensure ‘right’ projects are progressed for the right customers.
• Help ensure consistent project management standards for the successful delivery of a portfolio of regional high value projects, and covering a variety of key regulatory and strategic initiatives.
• Maintain an ongoing relationship with the Business as required to streamline the order-book and deliver assigned projects in a timely, cost effective manner with maximum business benefit.
• Manage relationships at a senior level with Business, through adequate reporting, updates, and dashboards.

Leadership & Teamwork:

• Ensure the highest level of quality for all activities and products within relevant field of influence by providing a consultancy role to IT and business teams where appropriate
• Introduce new techniques, products, services, technologies and standards where needed, via the appropriate channels
• Manage people, by setting objectives related to delivery for direct reports, in-line with HR Guidelines; focusing on Snapshot surveys and expectation management, career planning, staff development, assessment, training, motivation, discipline, recruitment, and retention, to assist the team in promoting the highest professional standards.
• Manage a team of IT professionals performing service management work and/or the deployment of Group Systems, which can include the development of new functionality, and the on-going support and maintenance of production services.
• Responsible for Run the Bank (RTB) budget, with the responsibility of providing governance on support cost. Plan and optimize resources between teams, with key focus on RTB planning year on year.

Operational Effectiveness & Control:

• Accountable for every service provided
• Proactively review, refresh, communicate and record in EIM standards, principles, patterns and strategies.
• Ensure compliance with all relevant internal instructions (FIMs, GSMs, circulars) and external regulatory requirements, including the management of operational risk and adherence to the Group's standards of ethical behavior
• Assessment & review of Cloud systems workloads, and driving Cloud agenda in compliance with the Country regulations
• Responsible to ensure the adherences to all Group processes and guidelines.
• Ensure that project management tools and the accepted best practice techniques and standards provided by HSBC are utilized and shared with other teams
• Implement strong planning and resource forecasting techniques
• Prepare and schedule manpower resources ensuring they are deployed

effectively at all times

• Close coordination with DBS Functions across the region and the Group to define and plan the introduction of new systems or changes to existing systems, identifying costs and requirements and ensuring plans are in place to exploit them
• Engage with business and IT teams in various locations and on occasion, with external vendors to provide specialist expertise in the development of IT systems with the objective of optimizing performance and improving quality whilst increasing cost-effectiveness.
• Help ensure consistent project management standards for the successful delivery of a portfolio of regional high value projects and covering a variety of key regulatory and strategic initiatives.
• Operate as best in class practitioner and bring industry standard project process expertise to all initiatives whilst building strategic direction for the practice.
• Ensure compliance with all relevant internal instructions (FIMs, GSMs, circulars) and external regulatory requirements, including the management of operational risk and adherence to the Group’s standards of ethical behavior

Major Challenges:

• Managing competing priorities IT projects needing access to expert systems knowledge
• Effective judgment and decision making as the local ‘authority on business function and solutions
• Working with complex globally distributed project teams to deliver
• Understanding the global strategies for IT and the Group and working to optimize delivery in line with these strategies
• Maintaining knowledge of Group systems and standards for IT hardware, software, operations and networks
• Managing the appropriate balance of meeting business requirements and timelines, evolving the solution portfolio towards agreed future state, and promoting long term benefits
• Effective people/team management in the skilled shortage market warrants key focus on expectation management, career development for staff and building - maintaining and improving the Group culture of “best place to work” by keeping the motivation levels of staff UP is a key challenge but at the same time is the need of the organization to take it one level up in the direction of set goal
• Conflicting business priorities: Often the ongoing projects are faced with conflicting priorities which hamper the execution of the project itself and threatens the deployment of the existing skill component

Role Context:

• The Job holder will need to have the ability to set strategy and prioritize the work to successfully deliver service to agreed levels in a diverse and constantly changing technical and business environment, effectively coordinating the delivery of services involving elements delivered by other internal/external teams
• Effectively track and manage resource availability of the support teams.
• Assessment & review of Cloud systems workloads, and driving Cloud agenda in compliance with the Country regulations
• Ensure minimal delay for critical / High priority task
• Prioritize work based on Business criticality
• Provide Daily, Weekly and Monthly health check and progress report to management.
• Highlight critical areas and follow up till closure
• Status communication and timely reporting.
• Assign tasks and provide effective management to ensure the delivery of activities on time with appropriate quality
• Participate in Major Incident Reviews and Service Improvement Programs as required.
• Administer expenditure around RTB spend.
• Control concurrent deliverables and resources that vary in scale and complexity to meet changing objectives;
• Governance on the resolution of defects/Tickets raised
• Help implement strong planning and resource forecasting techniques for RTB activities.
• Manage relationships at a senior level with IT and business
• Drive the Agile Team performance and outcome metrics as required
• Engage with technology project and technology programme managers as well as product owners

Knowledge & Experience:

Experience

• Evidence of effective working with a distributed team
• Extensive experience in a leadership role in operations environment, with in-depth specialization in project delivery and management;
• A track record of overseeing delivery of multiple, large scale, complex programmes and projects
• Thorough knowledge of risk management
• Good knowledge of crisis response and recovery;
• Track record of successful staff management and motivation
• Demonstrated ability to rapidly build relationships with key stakeholders
• A wide knowledge of IT hardware, software, operations and networks
• Exposure to all stages of the system development lifecycle, from specification & design, development & testing, through to implementation, and training

Skills

• Understand the Regional and Group strategies of the business and Software Development
• Communication and interpersonal skills
• A comprehensive level of technical expertise
• Comprehensive commercial orientation, appreciating the business usage of systems developed
• Find logical solutions to problems and manage to resolution

Technical Skills

• Strong knowledge of project management frameworks & tools
• Knowledge of database analysis and design
• Knowledge of Operating Systems and database
• Application Protocols and Servers
• Methodology/Process, Development Practices and Standards