Applications Practice Manager - Data Solutions

Description: Position Summary:

The Applications Practice Manager - Data Solutions plays a pivotal role in driving revenue growth and customer success for HBS by leading a high-performing team of Team Leads and direct reports. This position is responsible for building and nurturing a results-driven organization focused on delivering innovative, customer-centric solutions that align with both Microsoft’s and HBS’s strategic vision. The Practice Manager will closely engage with customers to understand their business needs, foster strong relationships, and support the sales process from pre-sales through delivery. By empowering their team, setting clear performance expectations, and championing best practices, the Practice Manager ensures exceptional service delivery while shaping technology strategy and advancing the organization’s market leadership.

Roles and Responsibilities/ Essential Functions:

Business Acumen

• Works with business leaders outside IT to develop solutions.
• Develops strategies to meet Applications team goals and customer needs.
• Extends business acumen with high-level understanding across other Applications practices to better cross-sell and solution.
• Comprehend and contribute to enterprise business process flow.
• Analyzes market conditions and guides practice direction accordingly.
• Delivers informed decisions to drive practice success and customer satisfaction.
• Oversee Practice budgets and financial performance metrics.

Communication

• Easily cultivates effective communication with others throughout all levels of the organization.
• Communicates at executive levels and technical leadership.
• Facilitates effective brainstorming.
• Actively shares knowledge among peers and offers advice to less experienced peers.
• Listens actively, considers people’s concerns, and adjusts own behavior in a helpful manner.
• Conducts regular practice meetings to align team efforts with departmental goals.
• Uses exceptional communication to address conflict constructively and proactively to drive to teamwork solutions and deliver a great customer experience.

Leadership

• Manages a team and Team Leads for a Practice.
• Oversees the operational aspects of the work, such as budgeting, staffing, and reporting.
• Owns business strategy and budget / financials for Practice.
• Provides direction and guidance, sets performance expectations and goals, and evaluates and rewards the performance of team members.
• Exceptional at influencing, inspiring, and motivating others.
• Recognized across the organization and customers as a role model.
• Builds relationships to drive better decisions organizationally with appropriate talent and alignment.
• Models teamwork within and across practices.
• Addresses and resolves inter-practice conflicts.
• Collaborates with other practice managers and directors to establish leadership methodologies to coach, mentor and develop team members.
• Conducts performance reviews and compensation adjustments for their team with support from their manager.
• Mentors Team Lead(s) outside of their direct practice.

Practice / Brand Building

• Participates in establishing and improving team processes and standards.
• Serves as a key representative of HBS in brand building.
• Holds leadership roles in relevant organizations and user groups.
• Contributes as an active contributor to conferences, blogs, online forums, networking events.
• Leads development of solutions, offerings, managed services within practice.

Sales

• Aligns with sales teams by attending regular meetings, keeping visibility on Applications.
• Works with sales on growth of practice and how to position offerings.
• Provides service offerings aligned to Microsoft sales plays to help Sales win work by leveraging Microsoft MCEM process.
• Serves as a key pre-sales resource for Practice and Applications as whole.
• Drives cross-sell opportunities with customers for other Applications practices.
• Conducts pipeline reviews with sales.
• Engages in co-sell motions with Sales and Microsoft.

Technical

• Provides technical guidance and oversight on related technologies and projects.
• Stays abreast of the latest advancements in team’s supported technologies.
• Provides subject matter expertise and experience in reviewing solutions.
• Meets annual billable hour goal. Currently, the annual billable hour goal is 373 hours for this position. This number may change as the business evolves.

Requirements: Competencies:

• Active Listening – Ability to actively attend to, convey, and understand the comments and questions of others.
• Adaptability – Ability to adapt to change in the workplace - Ability to accept responsibility and account for his/her actions.
• Ambition - The drive to achieve personal advancement.
• Assertiveness – Ability to act in a self-confident manner to facilitate completion of a work assignment or to defend a position or idea.
• Coaching and Development – ability to provide guidance and feedback to help others strengthen specific knowledge/skill areas.
• Conflict Resolution – Ability to deal with others in an antagonistic situation
• Customer Oriented - Ability to take care of the customers’ needs while following company policy.
• Decision Making - Ability to make critical decisions while following company procedures.
• Goal Oriented - Ability to focus on a goal and obtain a pre-determined result.
• Honesty / Integrity – Ability to be truthful and be seen as credible in the workplace.
• Innovative – ability to look beyond the standard solutions.
• Leadership – Ability to influence others to perform their jobs effectively and to be responsible for making decisions.
• Motivation - Ability to inspire oneself and others to reach a goal and perform to the best of their ability.
• Presentation Skills - Ability to effectively present information publicly.
• Relationship Building - Ability to effectively build relationships with customers and co-workers.

Required Experience:

• At least 5 years of experience in the IT Services industry.
• A minimum of 5+ years of experience in data management and data analytics.
• Proven experience in leading and managing data analytics team.
• Experience in developing and deploying data analytics projects.
• Experience working with and creating databases and dashboards using all relevant data to inform decisions.
• Experience using analytics techniques to contribute to company growth efforts, increasing revenue and other key business outcomes.
• Experience with three (3) or more of the following technologies, required:
• Microsoft Fabric
• Data lake technologies
• Azure Data Factory or other ETL tools
• Databricks
• Microsoft Azure SQL, Azure SQL Data Warehouse / Azure Synapse, Snowflake or Amazon Redshift
• Streaming data ingestion tools
• Visualization tool experience such as Power BI, Tableau, or Qlik
• Analysis Services (SSAS - tabular cubes)
• Machine learning
• C# / ASP.NET

Preferred Experience:

• 5+ years of experience working as a Consultant
• 3+ years working in a people leadership role

Required Skills, Education and/ or Certifications:

• BA/BS degree or higher in Computer Science or a quantitative field (i.e. Statistics, Math, etc.)
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Scientist Associate or Fabric Engineer Associate
• Knowledge of machine learning frameworks and libraries such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, or scikit-learn.
• Strong working knowledge of data mining principles: predictive analytics, mapping, collecting data from multiple data systems on premises and cloud-based data sources.
• Strong SQL skills, ability to perform effective querying involving multiple tables and subqueries.
• Understanding of and experience using analytical concepts and statistical techniques: hypothesis development, designing tests/experiments, analyzing data, drawing conclusions, and developing actionable recommendations for customers.
• Business leadership; management of a dedicated P&L with performance-related goals.
• Strong problem solving, quantitative and analytical abilities.
• Strong ability to plan and manage numerous processes, people and projects simultaneously.
• Exceptional organizational and planning skills.
• Excellent communication, collaboration and delegation skills.
• Public speaking experience in a professional conference setting

Preferred Skills, Education and/ or Certifications:

• Master's degree/MBA

Equal Opportunity Employer – Including Disabled and Veterans

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