Regional Delivery Excellence Lead

Position Summary

The Delivery Excellence Lead designs and executes a comprehensive Delivery Excellence charter for the account / set of engagements keeping in context the customer objectives, contractual obligations, industry best practices and Cognizant best-in-class standards.
Responsible to understand the customer objectives and define service line specific processes / metrics in line with customer objectives.
Ability and knowledge on Agile practices, delivery risk management, cost of delivery and assessment processes and controls.
Should be able to work on strategies for the region and ability to connect with customer to understand their business and business needs. Work on communication methods and content to enhance the proliferation of Delivery Excellence levers among the teams in the region.

Typical Responsibilities
Provide local delivery excellence focus for APAC
• Steering the customization and implementation of Delivery Excellence strategy for the assigned portfolio, aligning to delivery leaders and other stakeholders’ expectations.
• Reporting and communication across the region including risk reporting, metrics and delivery performance.
• Driving governance measures at various levels through kickoff, PMR, Risk Reviews, etc. and report the performance of the accounts / projects to the Leadership teams as appropriate
• Connect & present actionable insights to the executive leadership team and capability to switch to dwell upon the operational details at an execution level
• Connect with clients to explain the assessment findings, corrective measures to be taken, and expectation from both parties.
• Assist with recovery of troubled engagements
• Enhancing the capability and performance of accounts through Delivery Excellence training and enablement programs
• Evangelizing Knowledge Management across the portfolio

Design and lead Delivery Maturity Process, tools, and assessments.
• Enabling and co-working with the accounts / projects in compliance of regulatory requirements, other certification requirements of the Organization and the Customers for specific domain. Support closure of external/internal audit findings, RCA / CAPA / FMEA for escalations
• Delivery risk exposure prevention, delivery checks & control and product / service quality assurance through independent evaluation

Deployment on industry frameworks, standards & models
• Driving of Product and Service quality through the adoption of Engineering and Service delivery frameworks
• Ensure effective tracking of project metrics and usage for decision making. Driving a management-by-metrics culture across the assigned portfolio
• Conduct assessments and Provide GO/COND/NO-GO by end of all phase end assessments
• Support in building maturity through the promotion and local facilitation (where required) of Agile/DevOps, UX, technical assessments and audits - in co-ordination with offshore teams and COEs.
• Solution consultant for projects to adopt right tools and measure to ensure product & service quality and productivity improvement
• Lead CMMI & ISO certifications for the region.

Lead the project level customer Satisfaction & risk governance
• Run the PCSAT surveys for all customers in the region, analyze the feedback and ensure corrective actions are taken.
• Bubble up customer sentiments to the leadership via the implementation of effective risk management process
• Early risk discovery and timely escalation
• Facilitation of a geo risk council – aligning with BU risk processes and ensuring consistent reporting between onsite and offshore and between verticals and horizontals.

Strengthen customer relationships
• Connect with all the critical customer POCs from all the key accounts in the region, as an independent body from Cognizant.
• Gather feedback through regular connects and bubble up risks to the account teams and leadership.
• Perform stakeholder relationship analysis.

Build strategy and effective communication
• Ability to convert the customer connects information into business and delivery strategies for the region.
• Design the content and communication plan for the region.

Account Centricity and Client Advocacy.
• Developing Account-specific Delivery Excellence charters for focus accounts and working with delivery teams on effective implementation
• Helping on-site delivery teams with their interactions with customers by promoting Delivery Excellence across the geography
• Anchoring CSS/CRS analysis and action planning (with Ops and Account Leaders)
• Supporting account or project teams during customer visits, audits and other customer events

Pursuit and contracting support
• Providing support to business development activities including RFP responses, project delivery due diligence and customer presentations
• Reviewing contracts before sign-off, identifying key critical contractual commitments, enabling compliance tracking of those commitments and highlighting any issues or risks as early as possible to stakeholders
• Supporting the Delivery Excellence Deliverability Assessment (DA) team to schedule and conduct DAs for applicable deals before deal submission and ensuring the effective closure of DA risks and findings

Innovation
• Fostering an innovative culture through increased local engagement with the global Continuous Improvement & Innovation programs.
• Co-creating continual service improvement themes with the projects by periodic analysis on project life cycle data
• Engaging with delivery and Delivery Excellence stakeholders to identify and drive delivery transformation themes

Qualification:

• Educational Requirement: Engineering / Postgraduate in any branch

• Prior Work Experience: Minimum of 12 years of experience in Delivery & Delivery Excellence and 8 years of relevant experience.

• Experience in driving various service improvement / transformation programs for various client engagements and providing thought leadership to clients for driving various transformation programs

• Managed cross functional teams and ability to lead drive initiatives through cross functional teams.

Preferred skills:
• Good communication, Client interfacing and presentation skills
• Experience in designing delivery strategies for delivery teams.
• The confidence and gravitas to interact and engage with senior leadership and clients
• Ability to deliver impactful and insightful presentations in an informative and engaging manner
• Good knowledge on various Delivery management/ SDLC methodologies, ITIL, Six Sigma, etc.
• Exposure to delivering projects using Hybrid Agile or Agile or DevOps
• Knowledge on various estimation models and Engineering & project management tools such as Digite, Static code analysis tools and CAST will be an added advantage
• Professional certifications in project management / agile / SAFe / DevOps / DevSecOps, etc.
• Experience in customer facing roles would be an advantage
• Ability to understand the business process / customer requirements and exposure to requirement gathering / analysis and designing
- Project Management experience (estimation, scheduling, risk management, resourcing, etc.)
- Ability to understand, interpret, correlate metrics and drive decisions
- Understanding of Cognizant Process and Levers
- Consulting/collaborative mindset
- Exposure to Audits as Auditees (preferred)

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