Job Purpose

BluNOVA is the data consolidating, insight generating and decision-making business unit within SA Telecoms giant Blue Labels Telecoms (BLT), a company founded by Mark and Brett Levy in 2001 to bridge the gap in South Africa’s economic inequality allowing everyone to interact and transact equally.

BluNova is responsible for aggregating data originating from multiple companies within the Blue Label group and therefore holds a massive amount of telco and digital transactional voucher data. BluNOVA helps the Group and key partners grow through unique predictive algorithms. We deliver automated decisions on actionable, growth insights. Further, BluNOVA is the industry’s aspiration for innovation, and is considered to be in the business is building businesses developing new data-driven digital business opportunities such as BluAdvance and AltBureau.

BluAdvance, born out of BluNOVA is a cloud-enabled digital platform designed to provide product and cash-equivalent advances to eligible South African consumers swiftly and efficiently when they need it most. The debut service is Electricity Advances, which addresses the fundamental need for access to electricity across South Africa.

AltBureau, also born out of BluNOVA is an innovative data bureau utilising Alternative Data, we offer insights into the transactional habits of 36 million South Africans, encompassing 68 million mobile numbers. Our platform is designed for high-volume yet remains efficient, easily accessible and cost-effective, delivering services ranging from risk assessment and credit scoring to micro-lending solutions, fraud detection, and enhancing marketing strategies.

Across the BluNOVA association of companies, we leverage scalable AWS cloud technologies to deploy our solutions, with a strong emphasis on automation. Our data analysis is performed in a Snowflake, DataBricks and PowerBI and uses Matillion for ELT pipelines while our Decisioning is done in the world class FICO Cloud decision engine.

At BluNOVA, we’re creating an environment that nurtures great thinkers. Our workplace is a collaborative environment that feeds of the thrill of innovation.

Project Management

• Facilitate the delivery of the BluNova Strategy both in BluNova and relevant business partners.
• Oversee the achievement and risk “blockers” related to product deliveries Partner with management to develop and review lean business cases
• Ensure project governance processes and decisions are applied consistently
• Provide input to budgeting process per project portfolio
• Ensure full adoption of JIRA, Confluence and other designated tools
• Work closely with Infrastructure, Systems Architecture, Product Owners,
• Development Teams, IT Operations Manager and other stakeholders to facilitate delivery and remove impediments
• Assume the Scrum Master role for selected projects to deliver as per requirement
• Enable, support and accelerate the transition from Waterfall to Agile (Scrum, Kanban) or any software development methodology elected by the BluNova team.
• Drive high quality of all project deliverables
• Managing customer expectations for project deliverables
• Managing stakeholder communications
• Implement an effective system of project governance
• Supporting and educating the Business Delivery and IT Operations Manager, especially on grooming and maintaining the product backlog.

Process Management

• Define and manage a well-defined project management process and champion
• ongoing process improvement initiatives to implement best practices for Project Management
• Coaching the team on software development methods and technical and operational practices
• Facilitating key agile ceremonies
• Managing software development methods such as Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, XP, LSD and FDD
• Build competency within the Decisioning and Capabilities teams by developing project metrics
• Provide leadership with meaningful performance metrics and status reports based on JIRA dashboards
• Identify risks proactively, drive timely mitigation, and escalate to management appropriately

Project Planning

• Define project scopes with Business Stakeholders
• Lead project status and working meetings
• Manage risks and issues
• Correct deviations from plans
• Provide input into delivery planning for assigned projects

Leadership

• Assessing the Scrum maturity of the BluNova team
• Coaching the BluNova team to higher levels of maturity, at a pace that is sustainable and comfortable for the team and organisation.
• Role model behavior and motivate team members in line with the core values

Work collaborations

• Build a culture of respect and understanding within BluNova and the organisation
• Recognise outcomes which resulted from effective collaboration between teams
• Build co-operation and overcome barriers to information sharing, communication and collaboration across the organisation
• Facilitate opportunities to engage and collaborate with external stakeholders to develop joint solutions
• Provide the required information to the relevant teams to ensure effective delivery of initiatives
• Strive to ensure deadlines are met and deviations are managed as prescribed by the ways of work

Data Gathering and, Curation

• Understand the breadth of BluNova’s data sets and engage in interactive data exploration and data-driven storytelling to communicate or apply this in business
• Source and motivate for new data and/or features (both within and external to partner companies) that may be required to deliver DaaS or modelling requirements.
• Assess the effectiveness and accuracy of new data sources and ensure that they are appropriate for the BluNova environment.
• Ensure that informative datasets are appropriately served for analytics and BI applications inside and outside of BluNova as required
• Describe and motivate for changes in data requirements for the data engineer and/or data scientist to include in the pipeline.
• Influence the architecture of data structures and feature sets so that they, facilitate diverse and detailed analyses, enable large scale processing, manage data sensitivity and promote future applications of the DaaS environment.

Requirements

Behavioural Competencies

• Plan and align
• Communicate effectively
• Ensure accountability
• Collaborates
• Financial acumen
• Manages complexity
• Resourcefulness

Education

• Post graduate qualification in Project Management (PMP) or related discipline
• Post graduate qualification in Information Technology or related discipline advantageous

Experience

• Minimum of 5+ years of combined project management, scrum master and development work experience required, with at least 3 years using Agile methodologies