Sr. Manager BSS Planning & Operations

Purpose

Lead the Business Support Systems (BSS) function to ensure stable, scalable, and efficient operations. Drive the strategic evolution of the BSS stack to enable digital & Intelligent transformation, faster time-to-market, superior customer experience and regulatory compliance. Act as the bridge across commercial, customer care, engineering, finance, revenue assurance and external partners while aligning with parent company’s and industry best practices.

Key Responsibilities:

BSS Operations & Stability

• Ensure end-to-end stability, reliability, and resilience of BSS platforms (CRM, Billing/Charging, Mediation, Order Management, Provisioning).
• Own incident, problem, and escalation management to minimize downtime and secure 24×7 availability.
• Establish and run Change & Release Management (CAB, controlled deployments, rollback readiness, release management) with minimal customer impact.
• Define and maintain Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) such as system availability, response time/latency, throughput, and capacity headroom, and regularly conduct Disaster Recovery (DR) drills to validate Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) targets.
• Define and enforce SLAs/OLAs; monitor, analyze, and publish operational performance.

Planning, Architecture & Optimization:

• Lead the BSS roadmap and architectural evolution aligned to business priorities and CMCC standards.
• Benchmark vendor/product roadmaps; prioritize features and integrations by business value, scalability, security, and compliance.
• Evaluate and incorporate new developments in BSS technologies, digital business models, and regulatory requirements to keep the platform modern, compliant, and market-aligned.
• Adopt TM Forum Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and TMF Open APIs; prefer catalog-driven, API-first, microservices-based designs.
• Drive cost, performance, and reliability optimization (capacity planning, tuning, automation).

Demand Fulfilment / Requirement Management:

• Translate business requirements from commercial, customer care, finance, IT, and network into clear, actionable technical specifications.
• Oversee workload and effort estimation using global best practices and methodologies such as COSMIC to ensure accuracy and transparency.
• Orchestrate end-to-end delivery across architecture, integration, testing, and operations, serving as the primary enterprise-level escalation point for BSS dependencies.
• Align subfunctions to operate in synergy, maximizing effectiveness, accountability, and organizational coherence.

Customer Experience & Business Agility:

• Drive initiatives that improve customer journeys, reduce operational defects, and accelerate time-to-market for new products and services.
• Enable consistent omni-channel customer experience across USSD, mobile app, web, contact center, and chatbot channels.
• Enforce error-free deployment practices (UAT, dry-runs, backward compatibility).

Governance, KPIs & Compliance:

• Define, track, and improve operational KPIs (availability, MTTR/MTBF, deployment success, order fallout rates).
• Lead policy and process development aligned with ITIL and TM Forum (eTOM, SID, TAM) frameworks.
• Ensure regulatory compliance (e.g., data privacy & residency, Cloud-First/PDP, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001) and maintain audit-readiness.
• Collaborate with Revenue Assurance to embed and monitor billing/charging/provisioning controls, identify and rectify leakages, and maintain evidence for audits.

Vendor & Partner Management:

• Govern BSS vendors, SIs, and Managed Service Providers (MSPs): SLAs/OLAs, KPIs, service credits/penalties, and continuous improvement plans.
• Lead contractual negotiations, roadmap alignment, and CAB participation with partners; ensure proactive risk mitigation and timely resolution.
• Build long-term, outcome-oriented strategic partnerships.

Leadership & Continuous Improvement:

• Lead and mentor a high-performing BSS team; define roles, skills roadmap, and growth paths.
• Build a talent pipeline through succession planning, coaching, and capability development.
• Drive automation, simplification, and efficiency across processes and toolchains (monitoring, observability, CI/CD).
• Foster a culture of accountability, compliance, innovation, and continuous learning.

AI & Advanced Analytics Enablement:

• Integrate AI/ML and AIOps into BSS operations for anomaly detection, incident prediction, intelligent ticket routing, and capacity forecasting.
• Partner with commercial, Customer Experience, and RA teams on AI use cases such as churn propensity, credit/fraud risk, real-time offer decisioning, and revenue-leak detection.
• Establish data pipelines, governance, and MLOps (feature stores, model monitoring, drift detection, retraining schedules)
• Evaluate and deploy GenAI/LLM capabilities for agent assist, knowledge search, and customer self-service; ensuring security, safety, and compliance.
• Measure business impact of AI initiatives (time-to-resolution, CPM/TAT uplift, leakage reduction, cost-to-serve) and scale successful use cases.

Qualification:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, IT, Telecommunications, or related field (Master’s preferred).

Work Experience:

• Preferably 10+ years in Telecom IT/BSS with at least 4-5 years in supervisory, leadership and managerial roles.
• Strong domain expertise across the complete BSS stack: CRM, Online Charging System, Billing, Mediation, Order Management, Provisioning, and catalog-driven product models.
• Proven track record in operations, change/release management, incident/problem management, and vendor/MSP governance.
• Working knowledge of TM Forum standards and ITIL.
• Hands-on exposure to AI/ML in telecom would be preferred.
• Professional certifications such as ITIL 4 Managing Professional and TOGAF Enterprise Architecture are highly desirable; cloud or AI/ML certifications would be an added advantage.
• Excellent stakeholder management, communication, presentation and negotiation skills.

Key Attributes/Skills:

• Strategic and hands-on leadership in mission-critical environments.
• Regulatory and compliance-first mindset with robust governance.
• Strong data and AI orientation; comfortable translating business outcomes into measurable models and automations.
• Crisis leadership and sound judgment under pressure.
• Customer-centric, outcome-driven, and collaborative.