M-Pesa Africa - Senior Manager: Service Operations at Safaricom Kenya

About the Role

Reporting to the Chief Technology Officer, the Senior Manager - Service Operations is accountable for ensuring delivery of value to customers across M-Pesa Africa markets (end to end operational service), ensure service failover mechanisms, achievement of the service levels captured in SLAs/OLAs with suppliers. They provide operational support, guidance and oversight to M-Pesa deployed markets, accountability for continuous service improvements of all M-Pesa Africa Services operated by IT Services and external partners to deliver agreed service levels at lowest possible costs, budget management reporting and control.

Responsibilities

Impact on the business 

• Provide a stable and reliable M-Pesa service according to agreed service levels to the business and customers, through a transparent and simple Operating Model
• Define and manage the working relationships with all support partners including Group Technology Operations, Software Suppliers, System Integrators, Support & Operations Service provider, Local Markets, Partner Markets and other 3rd party suppliers with a goal of delivering a cost effective and high quality M-Pesa Mobile Payment service proposition
• Participate in the decision-making process and prioritisation of deployments across the M-Pesa Africa Payment Services landscape
• Drive operational excellence by efficient support and operations processes, methodologies and best practices in an efficient setup across all organisations 
• While failure will undoubtedly occur, the role holder needs to deliver failover mechanisms that allow service to resume quickly or even avoid service interruption in order to deliver 99.99% service availability.

Customers, supplier and third parties 

• Deliver value to customers across MPA markets, aligning with the needs of the customer.
• Manage and steer the performance of internal and external partners using benchmarking and KPIs. 
• Build strong relationships with the chosen service providers and guide/coach service providers for problem resolution of complex cross functional issues where identified. 
• Design a robust support setup with software suppliers and system integrators. 
• Drive the implementation and own the end to end SLA and OLAs through the whole support organization including Vodacom IT, other Vodafone and Vodacom internal suppliers, local markets and external service providers

Leadership and teamwork 

• Implement Agile principles and methodologies into a team's operational processes wile working within Agile Release Trains
• Build strong relationships with senior stakeholders within the Vodacom Group, Mpesa Africa Team, the local markets, and strategic suppliers 
• Build an organisational setup based on speed, simplicity, trust, and clear accountabilities 
• Focus to maintain key strategic skills and transfer transactional/executional task to the appropriate support parties
• Coach the team towards the organisation mission

Innovation and change 

• Create ways of working to maximize the use of the Mpesa Africa deployment & operations team by ensuring that the team do not compensate for supplier deficiencies
• Identify and realize cost saving potentials driven by a joint continuous improvement programme with the M-Pesa Africa team and the chosen service providers

Qualifications

Apply if you have: 

• Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) undergraduate degree. 
• 10+ years of experience in the operations of large-scale, Online Transaction Processing and high volume complex enterprise web and banking grade systems and services across multiple geographies. 
• Agile certification is a must 
• Proven track record of implementing appropriate solutions for complex operational scenarios
• ITIL Qualified ideally to Practitioner level
• Proven ability to develop and deliver on IT strategies
• Proven experience in customer/vendor relationship management
• Proven Exco level engagement/influence and delivering compelling presentations
• Budget and Cost Management experience is a must for this role.

We are happy if you have

• Experience of working within a multi-national team and serving customers from multiple countries would be of benefit
• Experience of working in an agile environment will be beneficial

Our commitment to you

• A fair and unbiased selection process
• A robust  total reward scheme 
• Dedicated support and mentoring/coaching 
• An opportunity to work with passionate life-long learners
• An opportunity to develop and progress – plus a solid dedication to work-life integration. It all means you’ll have everything you need to advance your career and achieve your full potential.