EMEA Centre of Excellence Validation Director

CONTEXT

Oracle Consulting delivers very large and complex business and IT delivery projects based on the Oracle product set.These can be highly challenging and at the leading edge of cloud projects and are therefore strategically important to theOracle business. This can be across a wide variety of customers and industries. A need exists for a highly talented Validation Director to deliver customer success against these challenging situations.

The Validation Director has responsibility for the successful delivery of the Oracle Consulting Test and Validation activities at the customer. They are expected to operate at the senior stakeholder level – typically a C-level executive but equally, they will need to manage their senior stakeholders in the Oracle organisation. This is a senior level role and candidates will be expected to take high levels of responsibility for customer and Oracle success.

It is a very exciting time in Oracle Consulting with our strong focus on delivery of cloud solutions using our highly

advanced methods and tools across the EMEA region. Industry and IT experience is highly valuable to us. Existing Oracle application knowledge is desirable but not essential.

SCOPE OF THE ROLE

The Validation Director is responsible for the successful testing and validation activities as a key element of our major business and IT programs.

They will be expected to lead and drive all aspects of the testing and validation activities on a program from staffing, execution planning and control and stakeholder management both within the customer and Oracle\:

- To act as a trusted advisor to senior clients\:

- To drive successful validation outcomes for our major customers using the Oracle product set and Oracle Consulting methods and tools

- To be commercially astute when delivering an engagement

- To act as ambassadors for Oracle solutions throughout a customer engagement

- Take full accountability for the successful delivery of validation on a program or projects

- Develop a practical Test/ Validation delivery plan and deliver closely against it

- Manage the staff and resources to ensure optimum outcomes for the customer and Oracle Corporation

- Manage and mitigate Test and associated project risks

- Both advise and challenge the customer throughout the Testing / Validation phases

- Take full ownership to drive “best practice” in delivering Validation / Testing

- Develop strong relationships with the senior stakeholders within Oracle across our Development , Support and Consulting businesses

- Manage the re-use and feedback into the Oracle delivery organisation to enable constant improvement of our Validation Approach and execution

- Build a strong personal community within Oracle by sharing and assisting colleagues from other regions and practices

Knowledge and Competency Requirements

Description/Level Requirements

Education

· Degree educated or equivalent

· Qualified Test Manager through a recognized institute

· Preferably holds a professional qualification (eg accountancy)

Experience/Technical/ Professional knowledge

- 10-15 years of relevant experience as a Test Manager / Director through full implementation lifecycles

- 10 years of experience in Testing

- Strong and demonstrable awareness of different project management methods

- Excellent facilitation and management skills of the most senior customer stakeholders within the business and IT

- Ability to deliver results while under pressure

- A strong understanding of the commercial aspects of a consulting organisation and the role a Validation Director plays within it

- Experience of Testing/Validation on at least 4 major projects using packaged applications (Oracle, SAP, JDE, Microsoft etc)

- A creative and agile problem-solver

- Experience with interacting with third party resources, including offshore teams

- Strong team building skills, with ability to build quick and effective work rapport with distributed team members

- Must be self-motivated in learning new concepts and willing to share knowledge and skills with other team members

- Outspoken and passionate about delivering successful programs that exceed business objectives and drive business success for our customers

- Must have a high level of leadership and communication skills, with the ability to explain complex solutions and ideas.

- Excellent presentation skills

- Can demonstrate a strong awareness of the differences between cloud and on-premise solutions and their benefits and impact on Test approaches

- Politically-aware

- Ability to present an argument\: persuasive

- Willing and able to travel for project work throughout the EMEA region for extended periods, and has a European work permit

- Fluent in English, other European language an advantage

Location

Based in EMEA

As an acknowledged authority within Oracle, this senior-level management position provides consistent high quality and innovative solution leadership with industry-wide impact. Responsible for guiding the successful validation (testing) of an integrated business solution ensuring high quality and timely delivery within budget to the customer’s satisfaction.

• Provide technical leadership and help drive cross-team test engineering efforts to build systems and services that improve operational efficiency, increase velocity of test timescales, and drive reliability, scale and performance

• Establish and develop process and methodologies to meet and execute on test strategy

• Possess modern Dev Ops mindset to delivering best in class SaaS and PaaS4SaaS applications by focusing on comprehensive testing (including automation) of end to end flows

• Analyze and understand existing test coverage and automation frameworks, identifying opportunities for redesign, replacement, reusability, and improvement in efficiency and performance.

• Develop coding standards, procedures, and methodology for automated testing, working with other internal QA leaders, as well as functional and technical architects, to identify and align on best practices, incorporating the latest industry tools and technologies.

• Direct teams to create test plans, defining the test architecture, specifying positive and negative testing techniques, and addressing service functionality, monitoring, integration, performance, resiliency, security, scalability, and reliability.

• Identify and/or design modern automated test techniques to update and upgrade existing manual and automated tests

• Drive end-to-end test automation, with automated test environment deployment, zero manual testing, and integrated, aggregated status reporting.

• Use Agile techniques to develop new capabilities and features for automated test harnesses and frameworks.

• Work with service development and release engineering to evolve the automated test portfolio usage in the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) flow.

• Provide leadership and guidance within the Consulting community for testing excellence particularly focussing on Automated tools.

• Understand the pain points, problems, and challenges faced by the test teams, provide direction to address them and in turn enhance quality and productivity.

• As a position of professional influence, this individual frequently operates at the leading edge of technology. Recommends and justifies enhancements to Oracle products to meet very complex customer needs. Exercises creativity and independent judgment in identifying and resolving major issues and risks impacting project success.

• Provides direction and mentoring to project teams.

• As a thought leader and trusted advisor, effectively influences decisions at the leadership level of customer organizations.

• Comfortable working in a matrix management environment. Strong influencing and negotiation skills to deal with internal stakeholders, customers, and vendors. Product, technology or industry expertise relevant to the portfolio focus.