Associate Director - End User Readiness Release Manager.

High level Job description

• Planning and Scheduling: You'll collaborate with various teams to create release plans, identify user dependencies, and establish release schedules that meet deadlines and minimize disruptions for users.
• Release Execution: You'll be responsible for monitoring the release process through various stages, ensuring adherence to established procedures and timelines.
• Communication and Coordination: You'll act as a central point of contact, keeping all stakeholders informed about the release process, potential roadblocks, and progress updates. This will involve clear and concise communication through meetings, reports, and documentation.
• Service Acceptance & Change Management: Define and document user acceptance criteria to guarantee new services function as intended and don't cause user interruptions. Proactively identifying and mitigating risks associated with releases is crucial. You'll work with the team to develop contingency plans and ensure a smooth rollout.
• Documentation: Maintaining accurate and up-to-date release documentation is essential. You'll be responsible for creating and updating documents that outline release plans, procedures, and post-release impact reports & roll back plans, if release fails.
• Process Improvement: Continuously seeking ways to optimize the release management process is important. You'll work with the team to identify areas for improvement and implement changes for increased efficiency.
• User impact: Thorough testing in analyzing user impact before the release & close monitoring of issues reported post release and reporting.

Skills required:   

• Release management: 5+ years of proficiency in software release management or service onboarding life cycle, necessary preparations, communications, risk management, change management and adoption planning. Strong project management skills are a plus
• Stakeholder Management: Ability to effectively engage and manage relationships with diverse stakeholders, including senior leadership, department heads, IT teams, and end-users.
• Strong Communication and social engagement Skills: Ability to effectively engage users via Yammer and other social channels in the organization and become a user champion in driving effective solutions. Excellent communication and interpersonal skills are required.  Multilingual abilities are a strong plus
• Technology Proficiency: Familiarity with enterprise technologies, enterprise tools, mobile devices, operating systems, and enterprise collaboration tools/ platforms.
• User Experience (UX): Basics of UX design principles and methodologies, UX measures post release
• Highly organized and detail-oriented individual with a passion for ensuring IT id delivered with empathy while ensuring smooth operations

Why Novartis? Our purpose is to reimagine medicine to improve and extend people’s lives and our vision is to become the most valued and trusted medicines company in the world. How can we achieve this? With our people. It is our associates that drive us each day to reach our ambitions. Be a part of this mission and join us! Learn more here: https://www.novartis.com/about/strategy/people-and-culture

You’ll receive: You can find everything you need to know about our benefits and rewards in the Novartis Life Handbook. https://www.novartis.com/careers/benefits-rewards

Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion: Novartis is committed to building an outstanding, inclusive work environment and diverse teams' representative of the patients and communities we serve.

Join our Novartis Network: If this role is not suitable to your experience or career goals but you wish to stay connected to hear more about Novartis and our career opportunities, join the Novartis Network here: https://talentnetwork.novartis.com/network