UO Service Line Director

About HSO 

HSO is a business transformation partner with deep industry expertise and global reach. HSO leverages the full power of the Microsoft Cloud to transform the way in which people work and engage customers, ultimately accelerating the impact of cloud transformation and improving overall business performance. By leveraging the power of Dynamics 365, Generative AI, Data, AI, Copilot capabilities and the full Microsoft Cloud; HSO helps companies innovate faster by modernising business operations, adopting data-driven intelligent automation, delivering real-time insights and connecting the enterprise. Founded in 1987, HSO has more than 2,500 professionals throughout Europe, North America, and Asia and is one of the world’s top business solution and implementation partners and a member of Microsoft’s elite Inner Circle, representing the top 1 percent of partners worldwide. 

HSO UK has grown to more than 400 people in the region and we expect over 100% organic growth in the next 5 years - with this comes an opportunity to create, deliver and evaluate our evolving business.   

HSO specialises in industry sectors such as Retail, Manufacturing, Professional Services, Financial Services and Public Sector.  As an award-winning partner, HSO has been recognized as the global winner of the 2023 Partner of the Year Award for D365 Finance and as a Finalist for D365 Sales and Marketing. In addition to Best Tech Company 2021 to Work For and the 6th Best Large Company to Work For in 2022.   

At HSO we take pride in being large enough to serve, but small enough to care. We are uniquely positioned to empower you to transform your career without compromising your life and we take pride in investing as much in our people as we do in our clients. 

At HSO we transform the way in which people work and how businesses operate to get results for our clients. This takes exceptional cutting-edge technology, knowledge, talent, determination and entrepreneurial spirit. Our culture and values support entrepreneurial mindsets and attitudes where your voice will always be heard. 

Purpose of the Role 

Our Unified Operations (UO) Service Line was established in 2020, generates over £40m in revenue, has c.160 people, 50 customers and is hungry for more. Our vision is for UO to continue to be the growth engine of our UK business and the ERP provider of choice for Microsoft customers.  While this is a UK role, there is also HSO-wide global contribution to the UO Service Line; sharing knowledge, experience and helping others achieve.   

This role is responsible for leading our biggest team of Microsoft professionals, including pre-sales, functional and technical consultants, developers and analysts. They will influence and guide our commercial, consulting and technical resources/capabilities in the best way possible, ensuring our customer remains our focus. HSO have exciting plans and opportunities like these are rare to find.  This role is all about commercial awareness, influencing skills and relationships, be there with your customer leaders, industry experts or Microsoft and delivering successful outcomes for our valued customers.  Success in this role is achieved through partnering with your sales team to find the win:win, fantastic customer satisfaction, owning and growing profitable revenue, positively contributing to HSO-UK and HSO-Global activities and people having fulfilling careers in high performing teams.   

Overview of Experience and Key Responsibilities 

People & Culture 

• Value, stretch, motivate, empower and support our Unified Operations team. 
• Be a leader who is at the heart of our business culture, embedding our values; we care, we are curious and we give clarity. 
• Lead a multi-level coaching and mentoring practice ensuring the development of consultants while delivering high-quality services. 
• Ensure your people are up-to-date in their functional knowledge and align to required skills, knowledge and certification requirements. 
• Ensure that UO have just-in-time quantity and quality of resources to deliver the demand; by specialisation and/or by industry. 
• Play a significant role in the UK Senior Leadership team. 
   

Strategic and Business Development through Sales 

• Work with the Industry Directors in Sales to develop, optimise and market UO specific services and solutions to excite the market about our innovation and industry knowledge to drive new business and market share. 
• Deliver UO’s growth strategy through deep involvement and partnering with Sales and Pre-sales to identify and target the best opportunities for new or existing customer, with the best commercial value. 
• Be the voice and face of UO for HSO-UK to the outside world. 
• Collaborate with Marketing to develop, optimise and market UO specific services and solutions portfolio to drive new business and market share.  
• Leverage relationships with relevant customer stakeholders/leaders, as well as HSO (industry) engagement leaders to identify opportunities for additional services. 
• As required, work personally or via your colleagues and team members to estimate projects, establish rates, and determine resource/team composition on projects. 
• Manage and own the direct and indirect demand side of UO by having a detailed understanding and plan for revenue, sales and pipeline.  

Strategic and Business Development through Service 

• Fulfil role of ‘executive sponsor’ on named programmes, enabling you to use your knowledge, experience and relationships to provide oversight and challenge to both customer and HSO leaders in both good times and more challenging ones.  
• Build/maintain relationships with relevant customer leaders, as well as HSO (industry) engagement leaders, ensuring their requirements/expectations are realistic, comply with best practices, are achievable in time, in scope and budget, are achievable within the defined technical/solution- architecture at acceptable performance, and thus can be delivered successfully. 
• Be accountable for all projects (including work products and deliverables), delivered by UO resources, where a UO project may be part of a single engagement or part of a multi-service line engagement.  
• Ensure UO projects are shaped, sold and setup to deliver a successful project and overall engagement which includes: 

• Project functional scope (functions, processes, sites, solution/technical architecture, etc.), project organisation with identified names (client and HSO side), project services scope, project roles and responsibilities, project governance.
• Project budget estimate, and terms which allow to develop/change budget from T0 to Tx. 
• A project plan and timeline with terms which allow to develop/change timelines.
• Ensure UO projects are delivered on time, in scope, and within budget; according to practice standards. 
• Ensure UO projects and resources produce high quality work products and deliverables. 
• Ensure UO projects achieve client satisfaction score of 4+ on a scale 1-5. 
• Ensure the actual project profitability (PSC) is within 3% of the estimated/sold profitability. 

Strategic and Business Development through Practice Management 

• Partnering with our Industry teams to deliver compelling commercial propositions though our pre-sales and Sales teams.
• Manage the resource pyramid, resource management, utilisation, project/team margins, and estimates. 
• Manage service line profitability (SSC) improvement initiatives such as standardising, efficiency and productivity gains, incl. offshore / re-use. 
• Actively participate in the global alliance of other UO Service Line Directors, about trends, knowledge, best practices, references, etc. 
• Grow the Global Services / offshore team outside of the UK ensuring the cost / delivery model is brought into line with industry best practice. 
• Maintain an understanding of industry trends and external risks to support the above.  
• Represent UO UK in global and group UO initiatives, collaborations and forums. 

Managing Risk 

• Responsible for driving Service Line revenue, profitability and hitting Business Plan targets. 
• Keep in regular conversation with the Sales team to ensure we meet, or exceed, our sales forecast.  

• Reporting on all aspects of team performance including utilisation, realisation and profitability and developing further management reporting to support the health and growth of the team.   
• Developing the annual Business Plan in line with UK and group objectives. 
• Drive and manage operational excellence within the service line, including optimising working practices and processes for efficiency and excellent customer service. 
• Be the final escalation point for major customer issues. 
• Be thoughtful in creating and using the annual budget, to spend HSO’s money as if it were your own, give value for money and an agreed return on investments. 
• Ensure the UO practice complies with requirements from Finance, IT, Legal, HR, Marketing and Group policies, authorisation rules and other governance standards.   

Requirements

Essential Behaviours  

• Demonstrates care with every interaction.  
• Tenacious. 
• Able to influence others. 
• Able to say ‘no’ to someone, in the best way possible.  
• Uses relevant business acumen and facts to make informed choices.  
• Ability to work in an entrepreneurial business. 
• Lateral thinker, who will actively listen and contribute to broader topics. 
• Ambitious both for personal development and success and ambitious for the success of HSO. 

Essential Experience 

• Proven experience in leading and shaping a multi-disciplined ERP function, preferably with Microsoft technology. 

• Keeps in touch with a broad network of ERP professionals. 
• Demonstrable examples of introducing a change strategy including new and complimentary applications, infrastructure, technology and industries. 
• Proven professional management experience in consulting companies with a strong track record of selling, managing and delivering engagements, using resources both onshore and offshore. 
• Delivering work through others. 
• Proven ability to lead a large team through change. 
• Managing an annual departmental budget, including forecasting, profit and loss. 
• Working collaboratively in a business with a parent company. 
• Leading a geographically dispersed team of at least 6 direct reports and a total team of 100+ people.  

Location

This is a hybrid role and can be based either from our Reading, Glasgow or Manchester offices, or home.  Regular, planned travel which will involve overnight stays near our offices and other UK locations for meetings, events and training.  Occasional planned international travel. 

Benefits

Parking and close to Public transport at Office locations

Holidays

Pension

Healthcare

Dental

Life Insurance

Tonic Wellbeing

HSO Perkz

Culture and many more