Solution Architect at Emerging Platforms

Emerging Platforms - A leading player in the world of IT consulting and solutions development based in Abuja seek an immediate recruitment of a Solutions Architect

Job Title: Solution Architect

Location: Abuja

Job Description:

• Collaborate with business partners to find alternatives and solutions to business challenges.
• Seek out systems solutions (either internal to client or external 3rd party solutions) that can be leveraged to meet business requirements.
• Engage the business client early and effectively building solid relationships and pushing IT value upstream as key business direction is being set
• Identifying, understanding, negotiating and documenting business requirements with various groups
• Facilitation of the IT planning and estimating phase
• Manage the delivery of business cases, scope and requirements documents, use-case documentation, test plans, and rollout communications
• Act as primary liaison with business development team and software development team during the development lifecycle from needs analysis and bug tracking to UAT and rollout
• Developing and managing direct relationships with key stakeholders and subject matter experts to ensure the business solutions are aligned with their goals and priorities, and how process automation through IT solutions will help them reach their goals.
• Balance the customer’s requirements with technical constraints (e.g., application size, network bandwidth, hardware/software/equipment selections) to ensure that the value of the project is realized. Clearly understand, articulate and document existing “as-is” systems & business architecture and define strategy for “to-be” architecture.
• Exercise independent judgment in developing methods, techniques, architectures and standards for obtaining solutions. Ensures scalability and international capabilities of technology
• Create and maintain a cohesive, coordinated plan to deliver solutions that meet the stakeholders priorities within budgetary and product requirements
• Budget management – Define and gain agreement on a project budget – ensures project tracks to the budget
• Provide in-depth business & technical strategy for systems solutions, identify business gaps and correlate to potential solutions
• Drive the prioritization process by which decisions are made around the final project scope
• Execute on project plans and assist others in executing on project plans across the various groups
• Makes scope/schedule/resources (including budget) trade-off decisions with little or no guidance
• Ensure line of business priorities and IT capabilities (technology and resources) are aligned
• Analyze and document requirements and use appropriate techniques to refine, decompose, review and validate requirements. Ensure requirements are traceable, well communicated and aligned to the overall business or solution vision
• Demonstrate a sound understanding of how the overall business solution is positioned, deployed and supported globally. Evangelizing business benefits to IT and influence project team priorities as well as to resolve user issues

Specifications

• Strong negotiation and consensus building skills when dealing with internal customers, stakeholders and team members
• Ability to understand current/changing business processes, participation in defining application and platform functionality
• Has built credible customer relationships both in immediate team and across multiple customer groups
• Can identify business issues and develop risk mitigation strategies
• Sound understanding of IT technology concepts. Must have a basic understanding of software architectures, MS products, development tools, etc. This person does not need to have deep technical knowledge
• This individual also needs to be a strong leader who can focus on the vision and strategies of the group while managing the tactical components of running the daily business. Balance daily support needs with long-term strategy and successfully combine vision and reality into effective plans
• Ability to deal with the ambiguity associated with working in a fast paced and changing environment
• Exceptional communication, problem solving and cross-group collaboration skills
• Demonstrated expertise using written & verbal communication skills to distil technology projects into understandable and compelling executive level presentations
• Ability to recognize and resolve conflict
• Excellent analysis and critical thinking skills
• Solid project/program management skills deploying large-scale cross enterprise IT systems implementations within the SDLC in a fast based unstructured environment because of the end to end nature of the Solution Management responsibilities
• Extensive product and program management experience with techniques such as use case analysis, data/process flow diagramming, process mapping and requirements documentation is highly desirable
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, MIS or equivalent with a cognate professional qualification.

Application Closing Date:
12 noon, on 14th July, 2014

How to Apply
To apply, send your Curriculum vitae and suitability statement of not more than one age in Ms-Word document to: [email protected] on or before 12 noon on Monday 14, July 2014 using title as subject of mail. Failure to follow all instructions leads to automatic disqualification. Interviews will be conducted via Skype almost immediately or a chat option.