Principal Analytics Delivery - Octave: Data and Advanced Analytics Centre of Excellence

John Keells Holdings PLC (JKH) is Sri Lanka’s largest listed conglomerate in the Colombo Stock Exchange. From managing hotels and resorts in Sri Lanka and the Maldives to providing port, marine fuel and logistics services to IT solutions, manufacturing of food and beverages to running a chain of supermarkets, tea broking to stock broking, life insurance and banking to real estate, we have made our presence felt in virtually every major sphere of the economy.

The Analytics Delivery Lead will lead the end-to-end development and deployment of Advanced Analytics projects in the business units. They will be responsible for all aspects of project and people leadership within Octave, JKH Advanced Analytics Centre of Excellence (CoE), leading cross-functional teams including data scientists, data engineers, delivery managers and associates working closely with business teams. They will structure and solve complex problems while ensuring high-quality of project outcomes. They will help the business units pilot analytics projects and assess readiness to scale. They will role model and drive a data driven mindset in the organization.

Key responsibilities:

• Manage delivery of analytical projects in partnership with business, IT and analytics team
• Lead pilot deployment of analytics projects to drive impact and sizing opportunities
• Lead development of pilot adoption metrics to track performance and prepare for scale-up
• Develop and communicate delivery goals, project plans, timelines, and key performance metrics to head of CoE and business stakeholders
• Actively build trust-based relationships with business leaders
• Identify new analytics opportunities in the organizational value chain
• Influence business teams and leadership to drive action through analysis and findings
• Manage resourcing through an analytics project delivery
• Actively facilitate development and stretch opportunities for the delivery team

Skills and Competencies:

Business Leadership

• At least 8 years of experience in business leadership roles, preferably in analytics or technology delivery roles
• Bachelors qualifications in a quantitative field (business, math, economics, finance, statistics, science, engineering); post-graduate qualifications are highly desirable
• Exceptional people leadership skills to drive cross-functional teams
• Strong project management skills to lead delivery of multiple projects in an 'agile' setting
• Successful track record of structuring and solving complex problems including developing, testing and preparing to scale up solutions
• Demonstrated ability to develop trust-based relationships with business leaders
• Ability to plan and execute multiple pilot project deployments
• Demonstrated ability to effectively communicate with business and technical teams

Domain Expertise

• Strong skills to identify and pursue new opportunities in the business value chain
• Deep knowledge of at least 1 vertical (Retail, Insurance, Beverages, Hotels and Technology) is highly desirable
• Ability to rapidly gain expertise in 3-4 functional business areas (ops, finance etc.)
• Demonstrated ability to drive high quality standards across technical and business teams
• Strong analytical skills to shape approaches to calculate business impact

Analytics

• Passionate about analytics with strong willingness to get upskilled in analytics methods and technologies
• Prior experience with analytics or technology is highly desirable