Director, Centre of Excellence, Publishing Performance & Intelligence

Job Title: Director, Centre of Excellence, Publishing Performance & Intelligence

Location: Shanghai (primary), Dordrecht

Full Time, Permanent Role

How the role fits in and its purpose

The Director Centre of Excellence (CoE) is a key member of the Publishing Performance and Intelligence (PP&I) management team, working closely with the journals group, other PP&I teams and stakeholders to accelerate good quality article growth. The main objective is to create a strong publishing infrastructure, introduce a continuous improvement culture and build the right capabilities/capacity in the team aligned with business stakeholders. 

The Director of the PP&I CoE will be responsible for leading and inspiring four global sub-teams focusing on: Project Management, Implementation & Workflow services, Publishing Optimisation and Journal Support. They drive continuous improvement across the end-to-end Research Journals Publishing workflow. Activities range from large scale and multi functional projects to daily workflow task optimization. The teams are located in Pune, Heidelberg, Dordrecht, London, New Jersey and New York. 

Responsibilities

1.    Manage cross-functional teams to optimize support for business success

• Inspire and motivate team members to achieve agreed strategic goals
• Recruit and develop highly skilled team members
• Develop, maintain and roll out onboarding and staff development programs
• Instill a performance-focused culture that supports reliable delivery of targets
• Support staff wellbeing, regularly monitor employee satisfaction and seek to address recurring issues
• Establish robust mechanisms for reporting on progress towards targets and goals
• Engage regularly with the teams via the formal performance review processes that focus both on targets, achievements and personal development

2.    Establish the strategy for PP&I CoE and execute accordingly

• Ensure that the PP&I strategic priorities are well understood by the entire team 
• Help define the PP&I strategy and translate this into the PP&I CoE strategy that enables innovation considering process & workflow optimization, continuous improvement and system & tools requirements 
• Seek input and share the strategy with the company wide stakeholder groups, such as the publishing, operations, customer service, finance and technology journal teams, and ensure that they are effectively engaged to support this work
• Translate strategy in specific business cases, projects, project management infrastructures and guide the execution of it
   

3. Drive operational excellence

• Establish and maintain project and program management infrastructure that supports detailed planning, prioritization, status insights, out of plan situations and workload distribution for a wide variety of initiatives. Either self initiated or at the request of stakeholders
• Continuously improve operational performance with a specific focus at its underlying activities, workflows, systems and tools based at professional project and Lean management methodologies
• Analyze, evaluate, and design publishing workflows to support effectiveness and efficiency and enable the PP&I teams and stakeholder groups to deliver increasing volumes of quality content with a best-in-class user experience
• Devise workflow approaches to support strategic author, editor and reviewer service goals 
• Specifically work with PP&I Collections Management and Acquisition team to deliver global infrastructure to further scale the operation globally

4.    Drive continuous improvement, manage change and collaborate across functional areas

• Build close working relationships with other key stakeholders in PP&I and across Springer Nature e.g. Publishing, Production, Editorial Operations, Sales, Marketing, Platform and Technology groups
• Bring people together and cooperate across disciplines to agree and establish end-to-end value chain synergies
• Lead cross-departmental projects and/or company-wide task forces and working groups

5.    Financial management and reporting

• Establish costs and operational annual team and project budgets
• Carefully control personnel and other costs to ensure budgets are adhered
• Establish and continuously report on operational activities, variations to budget and possible mitigation actions to further improve
• Prepare and deliver (monthly) project status updates for Business Review meetings 

Experience, skills and qualifications

• Master degree or equivalent with minimum of 5 years relevant (multi parallel program management) experience
• Strong leadership abilities and professional (multi-layer) line management skills 
• Excellent project management skills with a proven ability to capture multiple projects in a clear planning structure combined with (status) reporting and manage progress accordingly
• Motivated by and capable of continuously improving processes, workflows, system and tools across multiple functional areas
• Proven experience in system and tools development and implementation
• Ability to manage multiple stakeholders for both strategy and programme delivery
• Evidence of successful implementation of strategies, programmes of initiatives in large, complex matrix organizations with high dependency on working with colleagues in other departments
• Proven ability of working successfully across geographies and within a multicultural and diverse environment
• Experience with presenting to and working with senior (C-level) management
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to build both internal and external relationships
• Flexibility to travel when needed

Personal Characteristics

• Strong influencer, pro-active communicator and effective collaborator
• Highly results and performance oriented
• Structured and independent thinker
• Open-minded, empathic and self starting
• Establish interpersonal connections and build strong relationships naturally
• Excellent analytical skills
• Innovative mind-set and change agent
• Confidence to challenge status quo
• Resilient and persistence in overcoming obstacles in a constructive way
• Strong prioritization skills

Applicants should send:

• • A cover letter that conveys their interest and motivation for the role and indicates salary expectations,
  • A CV (which should include recent accomplishments and experience related to the core requirements of this role)

Candidates will be considered on an on-going basis. 

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