Managing Consultant - IBM Middleware Architectat CDW Careers

The Managing Consultant plans, directs, and coordinates activities of designated projects and associated personnel, subcontractors, and vendors to ensure that client service delivery is effectively managed on all dimensions: budget, timeline, quality, deliverables/outcomes, teaming/collaboration and updates/communication with a high degree of client satisfaction. Teams with other consulting and sales colleagues to develop a “trusted advisor” relationship with clients with the specific objective of achieving further penetration into accounts and attaining meaningful follow-on sales.

This role manages mobile application development delivery and design including: solution architecture and estimation, strategy development and execution, build, testing, planning and deployment of solutions. The Managing Consultant – Mobile Architect will be accountable for all aspects of development and delivery including (partners/subcontractors or staff), scheduling, risk management, internal and external communications, status reporting, and resource management (internal and partners).   This person will coordinate between a variety of vendors and technical experts. 

Primary Duties & Responsibilities
Delivery

• Manages and appropriately escalates delivery impediments, risks, issues, and changes associated with development initiatives
• Displays technical leadership and oversight of implementation and deployment planning, system integration, ongoing data validation processes, quality assurance, delivery, operations, and sustainability of technical solutions
• Exercises delegated authority for planning, directing, coordinating, administering, and executing both routine and complex technical elements of technical operations
• Advocates for security and performance standards
• Identifies trending gaps or issues in day-to-day performance of web applications and components, including by active monitoring, alert management, reporting, and process reviews
• Maintains issue tracking and documentation systems and provides reporting that ensures proper tracking and visibility of issues and projects
• Identifies technical and process improvement opportunities and socializes/advocates to get them implemented
• Works closely with development and QA teams in release planning, preparation, validation, post-release monitoring, and ongoing monitoring
• Maintains accurate program estimates, timelines, project plans, and status reports
• Provides process improvement recommendations based on best practices and industry standards
• Regularly serves in the lead consultant role on a project team to provide guidance to other team members. Serve as the executive program manager with responsibility for managing client expectations for specific Digital and/or Data projects, while seeking and fostering additional opportunities with clients. As part of this role, is responsible for managing the quality assurance process to deliver quality on-time deliverables.
• Identifies all points of contact from the system perspective and establishes contact with necessary stakeholders
• Reviews business and technical requirements from multiple user areas to ensure compatibility, identify gaps & inconsistencies and eliminate conflicting requirements
• Understands the business factors and motivators driving technology decisions with clients
• Participates in determining business requirements, technical requirements, and solution architecture for clients
• Provides input to final recommendations for technology solutions to meet business requirements
• Prepares and completes technical design inspection of other team members
• Gathers feedback and input from team members and works with senior project staff to optimize client relationship and improve quality
• Consistently achieves outstanding Client Satisfaction results on all consulting engagements
• Maintains accountability to work estimates and project financials
• Builds client-focused relationships with clients to identify business challenges
• Makes recommendations to solve client problems
• Complies with all time compliance and time entry guidelines
• Meets billable utilization targets

Practice Development: Supports activities that drive practice growth and profitability
Pre-Sales

• Directly interacts with clients, sales personnel and Sirius Presales Architects to identify, qualify, and validate client requirements for technology solutions. Pursuit activities include meeting with C-Suite personnel, creating and delivering presentations to drive Digital and/or Data solutions
• Creates solution prototypes and POCs which illustrate business value and garner client buy-in
• Provides technical perspective to ensure a realistic estimation of scope, cost and level of effort for proposal generation
• Creates proposals and contractually sound Statements of Work (SOWs), solution work estimates, and total solution pricing for profitable post-sales delivery integration, implementation and delivery. Provides significant and demonstrated services solution sales to meet practice goals
• Develops Cost/Benefit Analysis and rationale for large complex projects or programs with input from others on the account team

IP Development

• Provides technical leadership in the 2-3 core competencies and related offerings of technical specialty
• Conducts research & development work targeted to create frameworks, utilities, or best practices to enhance the efficiency and quality of client delivery efforts
• Cataloguing existing intellectual property (IP), determining strategic areas for IP development (including input into training and education plans), and evangelizing the use of practice IP by delivery teams
• Contributes and develops best practices, strategies, methodologies and documentation/templates. Occasionally presents externally as a thought leader at a regional level.

Staff Oversight:

• Maintains accountability to work estimates and project financials
• Directly supervises project staff with responsibility for ensuring engagement success and appropriate use of practice tools, methodology, deliverable preparation, and client presentation
• Leads code or other technical reviews and presents constructive feedback to technical team
• Mentors less senior personnel and serves as escalation point for their technical related project issues
• Steps into team leadership roles and empowers others to increase contribution and level of responsibility
• Training/Certifications - Engages in professional development, including obtaining industry related certifications as directed by management, to maintain continued growth in professional skills and knowledge
• Administrative Overhead – Respond to email, phone calls, complete weekly time cards in a timely manner, expense reports and status reports as required

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Management Information Systems, Information Technology, Engineering, Mathematics or a related field
• At least eight (8) years related IT work experience, to include experience focused on middleware (MW) integration work using IBM solutions 

Other Required Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience with three (3) or more of the following:   
  • IBM IIB 
  • IBM DataPower
  • IBM App Connect Enterprise (ACE)
  • IBM MQ 
  • IBM CP4i 
• Experience in Middleware architecture design for multiple customers      
• Experience performing MW project implementations, 
• Experience with MW IBM upgrade projects 
• Cloud platform experience w/MW implementations
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively with a wide variety of client and Sirius team members, including management and technical staff
• Demonstrated ability to understand a client’s requirements and present appropriate architectural options
• Demonstrated ability to provide guidance and leadership to less experienced technical team members, including delegating technical tasks, and resolving issues of poor technical execution without escalation