Principal Consultant-Application Modernization - Digital Velocityat CDW Careers

CDW is a leading multi-brand provider of information technology solutions to business, government, education and healthcare customers across the globe.

This role will focus on customer engagements and presales efforts related application modernization, containerization and devops. The role will require travel as needed to client sites, and can be a remote/work from home role when not at client locations. 

The Principal Consultant is a client facing, presales consultant who acts as a value-added technical advocate for clients. This role is responsible for understanding clients’ business requirements as they pertain to modernizing legacy applications, qualifying opportunities and creating solution designs that match requirements with appropriate products/platforms, managed and professional services. This role entails collaborating with other Line of Business (LOB) experts as required to address client needs (i.e., CMO, HR, IT), presenting proposed solutions to the client, ensuring the sale is made, and overseeing the delivery of these solutions.   

This position plans, directs, and coordinates activities of designated Software Engineering 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. 

The Principal Consultant contributes to the development and evaluation of junior personnel via apprenticeship and QA activities to ensure efficient operation of the function. This position is responsible for meeting team financial objectives through efficient SOW delivery and early escalation of potential change requests. The Principal Consultant 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.

Key Areas of Responsibility

Pre-Sales

• Directly interacts with clients, sales personnel and CDW 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 application modernization 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 (SOW), 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.
• Develop and lead workshops to help clients develop and refine required strategy to achieve desired business outcomes.

Delivery

• May serve 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 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.
• Assumes a leadership role in evaluating the clients' requirements in light of leading-edge technology and best in class structure and operating models.
• Provides input and quality checks 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.

IP Development

• 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.
• Maintains a strong network and promotes the organization at various meetings, forums, panels, publications, and conferences. Begins to establish thought leadership in the industry.

Staff Oversight

• Directly supervises project staff with responsibility for ensuring engagement success and appropriate use of practice tools, methodology, deliverable preparation, and client presentation.
• Leads 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 timecards in a timely manner, expense reports and status reports as required.

Education and/or Skill-Set Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Management Information Systems, Information Technology, Engineering, Mathematics or a related field
• At least ten (10) years related work experience with one or more solutions in the CDW portfolio focused on application modernization, containerization and devops solutions.

Required Qualifications

• Proven experience architecting solutions to modernize legacy applications.
• Demonstrated experience with container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, etc.  
• Experience with continuous integration, testing, delivery and deployment
• Demonstrated experience with agile development methodologies and software development lifecycle.
• Demonstrated experience with devops automation and tools such as Ansible, Terraform, etc.
• Experience with cloud-native serverless platforms
• Proven ability to quickly identify and drive to the optimal solution when presented with a series of constraints.  
• Experience with tooling that may include App Center, Fastlane, Jenkins, GitHub, Gitlab, Jira
• Demonstrated ability to drive sales, sequencing activities and deliverables to the client to value sell, earn trust and enhance margin.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively with a wide variety of client and CDW 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.
• Demonstrated ability to architect large projects from pre-sales Discovery to Solution Outline
• Demonstrated presentation and communication skills, including effectively communicating one-on-one, and in small and large groups, using a variety of presentation methods to sustain the audiences’ engagement.
• Demonstrated time management and organizational skills; ability to handle multiple concurrent projects simultaneously.
• Demonstrated ability to establish positive working relationships and conduct complex and important work critical to the organization in a team consulting environment.

Preferred Qualifications

• Consulting experience, especially in an agency or global systems integrator environment
• Prior presales experience
• Experience integrating Identity and Access Management solutions into infrastructure and Web applications
• Experience with Observability and Application Security tools
• Experience modernizing Java and/or .Net applications
• Experience migrating applications to public cloud (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Certifications in relevant areas of specialty

Data Privacy and Security:

All CDW employees are responsible to safeguard the information and information systems that they use or handle in the execution of their duties. Employees are obligated to know and perform their duties in accordance with CDW policies, standards, and procedures related to security and report security violations to the appropriate CDW authority

Participate at hire and annually in the Information Security Awareness training as well as other required training identified by the Human Resources department. Other data privacy and data security related regulatory training may be required based on your role or assignment.

Essential Functions:
This position exists to provide technical consulting solutions to customers and as such requires the ability to travel to and from customer sites and interact with customers on an ongoing and regular basis.