Field Operations Team Leader (Rift Valley) at WTS Energy

The roles include;

• Manages third party relations including KPLC, KETRACO, KENHA, KURA and the County Government.
• Gathers adequate market knowledge to guide strategic and tactical decisions for purposes of achieving and sustaining effective competitive positioning of the region
• Attends management, strategic and routine meetings.
• Manages regional office activities in accordance with management objectives.
• Plans, organizes, coordinates and controls all regional activities so as to achieve the desired technical objectives.
• Allocates, schedules, plans, organizes, leads and coordinates duty for, Engineers /Auxiliary support staff in the region and all contractors or engineers on technical visit to the region.
• Ensures safety of staff and/or contractors by adhering to company safety rules/regulations at all times e.g. use of safety equipment in heights, safety belts in driving etc.
• Eradicates, eliminates or reduces risk of fraudulent activities involving company property by staff and/or contractor.
• Prioritizes customer complaints and/or network failures to avoid disruption of service and subsequent loss of revenue to the company.
• Attends to regional or global faults raised through ticketing tool otherwise affecting the region.
• Coordinates maintenance and repair of support equipment e.g. Generators, UPSs and any other device associated with BS, Microwave backbone, Fibre infrastructure
• Undertakes equipment commissioning, acceptances, upgrades or downgrades, following due process and laid down processes and procedures.
• Manages fueling of generators by staff and/or contractors.
• Keeps a record of all spare parts. Requisitioning of the same based on re-order levels while forecasting and managing logistics regional functions.
• Ensures preventives maintenance is done as per target and updates regions’ preventives database accordingly.
• Ensures that all curatives maintenance is done in accordance with regions’ downtime budget and closing the ticketing tool upon every curative.
• Oversees and coordinates root cause analysis of every fault, with a view to taking relevant and necessary actions to avoid repeat occurrences and reporting the same to Management.
• Liaises with NMC/NOC, Engineering, and Network Build & Roll-out, Service Delivery team or vendors on ways to improve identified network areas of weakness.
• Ensures timely reports to HQ as required on daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis.
• Directly responsible for site and/or property maintenance either through the company or Subcontractors and management of regional technical offices/stores.
• Develops the technical, leadership or managerial skills of staff under the jurisdiction to attain a level of autonomy in their areas of operation and identify any needs for training and/or attachments for skill development.
• Conducts continuous and annual assessment of team members.
• Prepares and presents regional budgetary needs every financial year to Management
• Manages petty cash and ensures timely presentation of accounts to finance department.
• Team building - Provides quality leadership to achieve and sustain optimal motivation, commitment and participation of staff to achieve personal and company objectives - Maintains effective and motivated regional maintenance team - Allocates roles and responsibilities of each team member - Ensures that the right people are in the right positions and oversees the development of their skills and knowledge - Undertakes performance management for the teams; formulates appropriate
• Key performance indicators for the team and regularly reviews their performance - Fosters team work
• Costs - Financial management including, Reviews and vets technical invoices, completion certificates, and quotations from the company's Contractors - Monitors and optimizes costs in Service Delivery, and ensures adherence to budgets and undertakes regular reviews for improvement - Undertakes regular and appropriate implementation of costs review measures; Management of costs in services provision

Note: Other projects and responsibilities may be added at the company’s discretion.

Focus areas of responsibility - % of time spent

• All networks uptime target is 99.9%
• Fault resolution targets are 95%
• Projects implementation on time and budget
• Preventive maintenance performance on time and budget
• Quarterly Spares requirement forecasting accuracy of 98% based on equipment failure rate
• Standardized spare stocking updates and logistic functions with 100% spares inventory accuracy
• Submit regions weekly preventive, curative, incident and uptime reports every Monday and Monthly reports by the 1st of every subsequent month
• Presentation of regional float expenditure and vehicle mileage to finance department or OAM coordinator by the 5th of every month.
• Quarterly fault recurrence rates in region: <5% for Transmission faults and <5% for Wimax BTS , WIFI, and Metro Fiber nodes
• Team work and team building
• Relationship building and the management of third party relations including KPLC, KETRACO, KENHA, KURA and the County Government.
• Service delivery roles to ensure that customers in the region are happy with the company's services Working Relationships

Internally

• Constant communication and coordination with other Technical Sections and Commercial Department to ensure quality of service is maintained.

Externally

• Coordination with customers to ensure the company complies and meet the standards in regards to service.

Working Environment Conditions:

• Work normally performed in both office/outdoor settings
• Work at odd/longer hours and generally out of office hours including weekends
• Can be called back from leave days
• Phone should be on and reachable all the times
• May be required in the inspection of buried cable, construction sites and field facilities
• Performance of this requires working safely and may require outdoors in all weather conditions, all noise levels, hazardous conditions and on the full range of outdoor work surfaces.
• Exposed to the roads.

Operations :

• The employee be occasionally required to stand, walk to handle, feel or operate active equipment/objects
• The employee may occasionally lift
• The employee will occasionally climb towers/mast
• Interacting with live powered equipment and data circuits
• Exposed to the roads most of the time 
• Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision, distance vision 
• Heights and depth phobia
• Hazardous environments

Academic & Professional Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Electronics engineering or its equivalent with a bias in telecommunication with at least 5 years’ experience in Field Operations OR 
• Higher National Diploma in Electrical/Electronics engineering with at least 7 years’ experience
• Project management qualification would be an added advantage.

Experience

• At least 7 years’ relevant experience in a leading organization in the telecommunication industry of which 3 years must have been in a managerial level. 

Additional skills

• Excellent administrative, analytical and organization skills with attention to details
• Great ability to prioritize and work with minimum supervision; discretion and integrity:
• High degree of judgment and tact in handling the most sensitive, diverse and confidential situations or material
• Proactive attitude with a high degree of initiative, independence, reliability and adaptability, with an ability to anticipate and resolve problems.
• Ability to work in a team-oriented environment to perform effectively in a constantly changing environment with competitive activities and demands, and proactively resolve challenges in a productive way:
• Commitment, excellent inter-interpersonal skills and ability to work effectively in a multicultural/disciplinary environment.
• Very high degree of flexibility and a demonstrated capacity to handle a variety of multiple concurrent activities, to judge priorities and take initiative in a fast paced environment under tight deadlines
• Leadership skills
• Dependable and reliable Core Technical competencies required for the role 
• Ability of understanding business development strategies and mobilizing the team without a compromise on their qualitative output and; 
• Ability of ensuring that cost controls; profitability and risk management are part of Field Operations management.