Portfolio Architect

This job has now expired please search on the home page to find live IT Jobs.

Role: Portfolio Architect

Start Date: ASAP

Location: either London or Sheffield

Duration: 3 months initially

Must be PAYE or Umbrella

Job Profile:

The Portfolio Architect provides architectural leadership across the WPB Operations portfolio of change. Primary stakeholders are IT Leads/CIOs, fellow Architects (Enterprise, Platform and Solution), Programme Managers and Business / Transformation colleagues.

They are accountable for assuring the architecture and design deliverables across the portfolio of change. Core deliverables are:

* Providing architectural leadership to guide architecture and design activities across the change portfolios

* Ensuring alignment to architecture strategy and roadmaps and meeting the desired business outcomes, through collaboration with Enterprise Architects and Business / Transformation colleagues

* Troubleshooting the delivery of strategic and high-priority programmes to achieve desired cost, timescale and quality outcomes

* Ensuring the coherence and integrity of architectural deliverables within the portfolios of change and where applicable promoting consumption of shared services to achieve re-use.

Specific Requirements for this role:

? Credible experience operating in an Enterprise, Lead or Portfolio architecture role.

? Able to build strong working relationships with stakeholders at various levels within the organisation, to support & influence the future direction of business & technology strategy.

? Experience & understanding of large-scale cash & cheque processing operations, preferably with some exposure in an international context

? Experience of leading an architecture function within a significant business transformation programme, taking responsibility for architecture governance/assurance, strategy and decision making, and maintaining alignment with multiple stakeholders.

? Experienced in developing and communicating strategic material - vision, strategy, roadmaps, cost models, operating models - to articulate the target state for technology and the plan to enable its delivery.

? Broad understanding and experience of a wide range of architecture domains. Must be comfortable working with diverse environments including: Legacy; Multi-Cloud & hybrid environments; Microservices architectures; solid working knowledge of batch & API integration models; multi-channel services (including web, mobile & physical channels); automation technologies including Robotic Process Automation, ML & AI; digitisation of manually driven & paper based processes; good understanding of Data & MI.

? Broad scope of experience across IT and business transformation projects - must be able to understand and adapt approach to the differing priorities of a wide range of business services.

? Experience of managing relationships and engagements which may involve 3rd party suppliers and vendors.

? Experience of Customer Communications/CCM, Banking Operations and Mortgages, Cards & Lending operations would be extremely beneficial but is not absolutely essential.

? Comfortable operating in an international role, where the ability to coordinate, lead and build relationships with diverse teams across the globe is essential for success.

? Comfortable with both technical and organisational complexity.

? Confident in challenging the status quo - strong communication, people management & negotiation skills.

? Good understanding of business processes and process re-engineering - any experience or knowledge of Lean would be an advantage.

? Capable of representing the Technology function within large scale procurement exercises, RFIs, RFPs including the validation and evaluation of potential Suppliers and their proposals.

? Able to identify & evaluate opportunities for innovation (in conjunction with Business Owners, SMEs etc) and to support & drive associated PoC/V exercises.

To be successful in this role you should have proven experience within the Technology sector with the following skills:

* Experience of working in financial services sector applying technology to business problems

* Able to translate business needs into appropriate IT solutions.

* Architecture breadth of knowledge & experience spanning Data, Business, Enterprise, Application & Technology Architecture

* Proven ability in translating business requirements into design and execution in a complex technology environment

* Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills - desire to solve complex problems at scale.

* Experience of Cloud, micro-services, API and modern data architectures

* Legacy platform integration

* Experience of applying digitization, automation and work management techniques and platforms to deliver STP processes (e.g. business process management, robotics, low code platforms, decision engines)

* Business Process Automation technologies (Robotic Process Automation RPA, assisted and unassisted automation)

* Workflow platforms

* Assistive automation technologies e.g. OCR

* Collaboration tools (Confluence, JIRA)

* Excellent written and spoken communication skills; an ability to communicate with impact, ensuring complex information is articulated in a meaningful way to wide and varied audiences

* Strong stakeholder management skills.

* Excellent time management and prioritisation of work tasks.

* Self-motivated enthusiastic and proven rapid learning capability.

* Utilises own initiative to resolve issues.

* Leadership, ability to motivate and develop a solution architecture team

Please submit CVs today!