Alpha Data Services Risk, Service Assurance and Implementation Oversight, AVP

Responsibilities:

• Act as a trusted risk and service assurance partner to the Practice Lead, providing structured oversight of platform health, service resilience, implementation risk, operational controls, resource needs and delivery commitments.
• Own the consolidated resource forecast across the team, translating the implementation pipeline and business priorities into forward-looking demand, capacity, skills and location requirements.
• Maintain a clear view of employees, contractors, vacancies, planned hires, funding, allocation, utilisation and forecast gaps; reconcile the forecast to approved plans and underlying delivery assumptions.
• Identify capacity constraints, key-person dependencies, capability gaps and competing demands early, and prepare practical options for reprioritisation, recruitment, redeployment or escalation.
• Establish and run the team governance calendar, including leadership reviews, resource and capacity reviews, implementation oversight, risk and issue reviews, and decision forums.
• Prepare agendas and governance packs, coordinate pre-reads, capture decisions and actions, maintain accountable owners and due dates, and follow through to evidenced closure.
• Maintain an integrated risk-based view of implementation and service readiness across clients and programmes, covering UAT evidence, entry and exit criteria, defects, data quality, interfaces, batch performance, dependencies, operational readiness, go-live controls, hypercare and transition into business-as-usual service.
• Continuously review UAT and Production dashboards, alerts, service metrics, data-quality exceptions, batch and interface health, support tickets and incident trends; validate the completeness and accuracy of reported status and investigate unexplained, deteriorating or out-of-tolerance conditions.
• Define key risk indicators, tolerances and control thresholds for critical services in UAT and Production, including availability, timeliness, data completeness and quality, batch completion, interface performance, exception volumes and ageing, repeat incidents, recovery performance and service-level adherence.
• Translate monitoring evidence into an early-warning view of operational, implementation, data, technology, capacity and reputational risk, identifying patterns across environments and clients that may indicate control weakness or a developing service issue.
• Own the risk escalation and mitigation framework, central risk and escalation register, and agreed triggers based on client impact, control failure, severity, recurrence, ageing, service-level breach, data readiness, milestone exposure, dependency failure and reputational consequence.
• Triage material risks and issues, assess impact and likelihood, identify root cause and required decision-makers, agree preventative, detective and corrective mitigations, and coordinate cross-functional resolution through to evidenced closure and residual-risk acceptance.
• Provide timely executive reporting on service health, UAT and Production risk exposure, control effectiveness, incidents, recurring exceptions, mitigation progress, implementation readiness, resource capacity and matters requiring leadership intervention or formal risk acceptance.
• Maintain governance artefacts including the integrated plan, resource model, organisation view, RACI, RAID log, decision log, action tracker, implementation scorecard and management dashboard catalogue.
• Coordinate post-incident reviews and thematic analysis to determine root causes, control gaps, cross-client exposure and lessons learned; ensure corrective actions are embedded into monitoring, runbooks, standards and future implementation plans to prevent recurrence.
• Monitor adherence to service, delivery and risk-management standards; test whether controls are operating as designed; and escalate repeated failures, weak evidence, overdue remediation, unmanaged exceptions or risk levels that could undermine client confidence or the reputation of the Alpha platform and service.
• Define, maintain and enforce risk-based standards for “done”, ensuring that changes and implementations are not treated as complete until UAT evidence, control results, Production readiness, rollback and recovery arrangements, accountable support ownership, required approvals and residual risks are documented and accepted. Required artefacts include internal-facing materials, deployment and recovery runbooks, operating manuals, procedural guidance, knowledge articles, training and handover content, release communications and newsletters.

Required Skills and Competencies:

• Demonstrable experience in operational risk, service assurance, operational resilience, technology risk, production oversight, portfolio governance, programme management or business management within a complex global organisation.
• Strong resource and capacity-planning capability, including demand forecasting, scenario modelling, utilisation analysis, workforce planning and reconciliation to budgets.
• Strong governance discipline, including meeting design, decision rights, RACI management, action tracking, RAID control and escalation management.
• Strong understanding of operational risk and resilience principles, including risk and control assessment, key risk indicators, risk appetite and tolerance, incident management, root-cause analysis, remediation, control testing, recovery and formal risk acceptance.
• Advanced analytical skills and the ability to interpret service dashboards, alerts, logs, incidents, data-quality measures, financial information and operational metrics; identify trends and emerging threats; and distinguish isolated events from systemic risk.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to produce concise executive updates that distinguish facts, assumptions, risks, decisions and recommended actions.
• Strong judgement and confidence to escalate material concerns constructively, while building consensus and maintaining effective working relationships across organisational boundaries.
• Ability to work independently, anticipate leadership needs, manage competing priorities and follow matters through to closure.
• Working knowledge of Jira and portfolio or project-reporting tools, including workflow, dependency, milestone, issue and action tracking.
• Strong proficiency in Excel and PowerPoint; experience with Power BI or comparable dashboard and reporting tools is highly desirable.
• Understanding of financial-services technology, data, implementation or managed-service operating models, with familiarity across Product, Technology, Operations and client delivery functions.
• A continuous-improvement mindset, with the ability to simplify governance, standardise reporting and increase automation without weakening control.

Education & Preferred Qualifications:

• University degree in business, finance, data management, technology or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
• Typically 10+ years of relevant experience in governance, programme management, business management, implementation oversight, workforce planning or financial-services delivery.
• Recognised programme, project, portfolio or change-management qualification is advantageous.

This role requires hybrid work model - 4 days in the office/week.

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