Head of Delivery: Digital Colleague

at  Unite Students

WHAT WE`RE LOOKING FOR IN YOU

• Passion and experience in setting up, managing and embedding a Digital Innovation capability and evangelising the potential across the business, whilst also bringing a very business focused, commercial mindset.
• Experience in translating business requirements in technical aspects of digital delivery.
• Affinity with new digital technology trends and how they impact large, complex organizations (looking beyond just the standard Web and App).
• Evidence of having delivered successful digital deployments from prototype through to adopted solution (with achieved business case).
• Sound knowledge of major Enterprise Applications (e.g. Salesforce, Oracle Fusion).
• Excellent listening, written, and oral communication skills.
• Strong communication skills to host and inspire based on digital broadcasts.
• Ability to anticipate and solve problems.
• Energetic, innovative, and flexible.
• Inclusive and learning leadership style.

THE ROLE

Unite Students recognise the importance of leveraging digital technologies to underpin our ambition. We are establishing three Digital Delivery Teams to take the lead on understanding the digital art of the possible, and translating that into compelling strategies and programmes which deliver business value. The three teams will focus on Digital Customer, Digital Colleague, and Digital Property which link directly to our three strategic imperatives of “great place to live”, “great place to work”, and “great place to invest”. These teams will work in a lean/agile way to learn and scale solutions at pace. Our Heads of Digital Delivery will act as Business Partners, developing close relationships with stakeholders across the Unite Students business, to identify and coordinate digital initiatives that will contribute materially to Unites growth and profitability objectives. To achieve these objectives, the Head of Delivery: Digital Colleague will establish and lead a team with the specific objective to understand our colleagues, both within head office teams and within our student buildings, relentlessly learning about their current and future needs, and delivering digital solutions to address those needs. The Head of Delivery: Digital Colleague will establish strong cross-business relationships, and provide a single "business partner" point of contact for the digital platforms under their care. Collectively the team will drive innovation at pace; progressively exploiting the full capabilities of our strategic platform investments; horizon-scan to understand technology trends, and prioritise experimentation of next-gen digital technology to support our future business objectives; strengthen our colleague engagement; and develop and utilise strategic third party partnerships for thought leadership and team augmentation. You will take ownership of Unites Colleague oriented platforms including our HR and Finance platforms. The team will work closely with the Head of Architecture and Assurance to ensure that all developments are in line with our over-arching technology strategy and its guiding principles.
The role will report into the Director of Digital and Information Technologies, and will define and report against key value metrics to measure the success and impact of digital initiatives.

WHAT YOU`LL BE DOING

• Be the Digital and Information Technologies Business Partner for our internal and colleague-focused teams.
• Act as an ambassador for Digital thinking across the business. The candidate will define and embed the target digital colleague vision and strategy across the organisation - including a clear definition of what digital means for the business, and what a high-performance, digital business will look like in the future.
• Develop, deepen and renew continuously understanding of our colleagues.
• Build a high performing team, with the skills, capabilities, behavioural traits, and culture required to seek out and deliver digitally-enabled value.
• Lead on horizon scanning for trends and next generation technologies.
• Develop and support relationships with leading stakeholders and keep them involved and acting as ambassadors from initiative identification through to deployment.
• Establish the capability in the business to cost-effectively and rapidly prototype new ideas/develop POCs working with 3rd parties/tech vendors as necessary to prove the value of new digital activities before committing.
• Ensure that strategic platforms are fully exploited for maximum business benefit, with effective knowledge sharing and collaboration.
• Manage the timely development and deployment of future and existing digital products in line with planned release schedules.
• Anticipate technical support and infrastructure needs, including environment requirements for planned initiatives and collaborate with others in the Digital and Information Technologies team to address these with the necessary priority.
• Establish and maintain clear backlogs of prioritised initiatives, working within a quarterly planning cycle for prioritisation and delivery.
• Report on execution success, value add, and progress against originally anticipated benefits, and ensure learning is taken from over and under variances.
• Ensure that our digital initiatives are reflected in our strategic plans and annual budget cycles.
• Assure that the digital journey is part of the recurrent internal communication and that digital initiatives get known beyond the perimeter of the intiative itself.