Focused careers

Integrations Consultant

Purpose:

Responsible for the day to day management of relationships with third party integrators and product providers across the product set, holding a detailed understanding of our integration partners, their associated roadmaps, their propositions and how they benefit our product set and clients, ensuring an understanding across our business and client base. They will work across the product set and the client base and are responsible for the definition and maintenance of the integrations, ensuring we establish and follow a standard approach to client specific integrations.

The Integrations Consultant will be the product owner, leading scrum teams, owning and managing the backlog to ensure prioritisation of work is aligned to the business strategy and priority. Liaising with clients and key stakeholders to validate requirements and solutions meet their business needs and are aligned to the product strategy, ensuring appropriate escalation where this is not achieved or does not look like it will be achieved.

The Integrations Consultant will assist the Client Services and Development teams with the resolution of support issues and liaise with internal and external development teams to ensure the appropriate maintenance work is undertaken to ensure integrations are kept up to date. The role holder will liaise with Client Services to ensure changes made and the impact of change are documented, understood and notified to all interested stakeholders, clients and third parties, whether initiated by the business or third parties.

The Product Consultant main responsibilities are:

Product Planning and Specification

• The role holder will liaise with clients and third parties, managing the day to day relationships with third party integrators, product providers
• Act as the Subject Matter Expert both for clients and internally, ensuring that others within the organisation have sufficient information to be able to carry out their duties
• The role holder will define changes to existing integrations across the product portfolio and client projects, this includes, prioritisation of defects, gathering, prioritising and validating product and customer requirements, undertaking requirements analysis and working with the scrum team to deliver market leading software assets
• Deliver Initiate and Product Requirement Documents with prioritised features, justification and commercial implications/requirements
• Liaise with the Programme Manager or Project Managers to obtain estimates and ensure that development plans are in place as required by the Product Lifecycle (PLC).
• Act as the Product Owner in the Scrum team, owning the backlog prioritisation and acceptance criteria in line with business strategy and priority
• Working with the team as part of the collaborative design process to deliver generic solutions for the marketplace, which benefit all our client base, ensuring the application is configurable where possible across multiple implementations
• Responsible for obtaining client validation of roadmap developments (both requirements and solutions) throughout the PLC
• Responsible for business acceptance of developments
• Responsible for knowledge transfer & internal promotion of the integrations capability
• Work with internal and external development teams to undertake maintenance work on the product set integrations ensuring integrations are kept up to date and that changes made are collated and notified to all interested stakeholders and third parties.

Market Analysis

• Maintain an up to date knowledge of the financial services distribution marketplace generally and specifically in relation to potential integration partners and the key business drivers and trends in financial services in order to recommend and implement developments to the product in order to maintain the market leading status of the product.
• Be an expert with respect to the competition
• Where relevant, attend key industry meetings, seminars and groups

Pre sales

• Pre Sales liaison in order to assist the sales team in their specific tender processes and to assist in ensuring accurate information is included on product capability and roadmap. Periodically, the Integration Consultant may be required to assist in specific Pre-Sales tenders, meetings or demonstrations
• Provision of content for RFI and RFP responses

Implementation support

• Provide input and information to implementation teams to enable specific client implementations to remain on or close to the product. Provide consultancy to implementation teams in relation to specific requests for assistance

Support

• Liaise with Support and Development on defect resolution
• Assist with issue resolution
• Provide updates to the Focus Support department on new developments.

People Management

• The role may require periods of, or ongoing line management of people

Key Outputs

• Definition and management of integrations
• Obtaining initial and detail estimates in conjunction with the Programme Manager
• Prioritised product backlog in ALM with associated acceptance criteria
• Work in partnership with Programme Manager to ensure successful on-time, on-budget, ‘to scope’ deliveries of product releases to support propositions
• Initiate and Product Requirement Documents which are produced to a standard that can be designed and estimated and built within an acceptable tolerance
• Solution Overview
• Release notes content
• Project Reviews – Presenter
• Sprint Reviews – Presenter
• Production of content for marketing collateral
• Produce and maintain product application documentation
• Maintenance of third party and product provider contact details
• To retain proper, accurate records in relation to Third Party communications and activities
• Technical input to support contracts
• GROW management of documentation (if allocated direct report/s)

Authorisations and Limits

• Owns the shape and scope of change to allocated lines in product set.

Qualifications / Experience (depth and breadth of specialised knowledge) :

Essential Skills:

• Experience in integrating with third parties and managing third party relationships
• Experience in successful management of a product lifecycle
• Good E2E planning skills and high level of organisation and discipline to meet specific target dates and objectives
• Thorough understanding of the processes, methods & standards operating in the organisation
• Clear understanding of the Focus market space and the requirements of a typical Focus client
• Knowledge across UK marketplace and competitor strategies, business processes, mainframe systems and web based applications and platforms
• Ability to influence a range of stakeholders (internal and external)
• Proven ability to establish strong working relationships with a range of stakeholders including senior management
• Proven ability to lead, motivate and manage people
• Proven ability to work across boundaries
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Excellent interpersonal skills; resolute but diplomatic.
• Ability to work on own initiative and under instruction, to tight deadlines, under pressure and without compromising quality.
• Proactive and highly disciplined.
• Flexibility in role, approach and skills.
• Drive, energy and enthusiasm, with a ‘can do, will do’ approach.

Desirable:

• Inquisitive nature when it comes to technology based business solutions
• Understanding of the business environment & strategic direction / vision of the organisation

Key Personal Competencies:

Customer Focus – Knowing who your customers are, keeping the meeting of their needs at the forefront of mind and taking responsibility for the service delivered to them

Preference for Action -Grasping issues that require resolution and ensuring that appropriate effective action is taken.

Communicating and Influencing – The ability to communicate effectively and to influence others to act and/or commit support to one’s own goals and objectives.

Creative and Innovative Thinking – The ability to think creatively or innovatively

Business Knowledge – Having a sound grasp of the Company’s plans and operating environment, the factors relevant to one’s own role and the interaction between one’s own role and others’ within the Company and outside

Planning and Organising – The ability to develop clear and logical step-by-step plans for self and for others which set out what needs to happen, when, how and by whom