Senior Specialist, Business Strategy and Planning (UniForum)

Senior Specialist, Business Strategy and Planning (UniForum)

Apply locations Ottawa, ON Main Campus time type Full time posted on Posted 2 Days Ago time left to apply End Date: December 5, 2024 (14 days left to apply) job requisition id JR19497

Job Type: Employee

Duration in Months: 24

Job Family: Business Operations

# of Open Positions: 1

Faculty/Service - Department: Programme Polaris

Campus: Main Campus

Union Affiliation: N/A

Date Posted: November 18, 2024

Applications must be received BEFORE: December 05, 2024

Hours per week: 35

Salary Grade: Non-Union Grade NC8 - 35 hrs

Salary Range: $91,917.00 - $114,078.00

Building on the University of Ottawa’s bold vision of excellence, the University is committed to enabling high-quality administrative services for students, faculty, and staff. To achieve this, the Office of the Vice-President Finance and Administration has launched a continuous improvement program to better guide, support, and empower our university community by providing effective, user-focused, and contemporary administrative services.

This continuous improvement program is supported by the annual UniForum benchmarking exercise. The Senior Specialist of Business Strategy and Planning will spearhead the UniForum data collection at uOttawa and drive continuous improvement by providing valuable insights to senior leaders across administration and academia. These insights will help enhance administrative efficiency and effectiveness throughout the institution.

While experience with UniForum is a plus, it is not required for this position as the University will provide training. The key attributes for this role are strong analytical, communication, and strategic skills and an ease with Power BI and the Microsoft office suite. By collaborating with various stakeholders, the Senior Specialist will ensure alignment with best practices and contribute to the University’s mission and goals.

Position Purpose
Reporting to Senior Director, Polaris Program, the primary objective of this role is to leverage UniForum data to deliver actionable insights and business intelligence that empower university leaders—both academic and administrative. By fostering strategic reflections and stimulating discussions around administrative performance, this position nurtures a culture of awareness and innovation, uncovering opportunities to improve effectiveness and efficiency across administrative services.

Key responsibilities encompass:

• Project management: Leads the annual collection of UniForum data. Plans and develops business intelligence projects, including scoping solutions, identifying data sources and business rules, evaluating the technical and operational feasibility of solutions proposed, and developing critical processes for validating systemic compliance with accounting rules.

• Business analysis: Analyzes business and strategic needs and recommends sound and justified business solutions to monitor periodical data related to operations and performance, solve business problems, increase administrative efficiency, lower administrative costs and improve service.

• Data analysis: Provides quantitative processes/data analysis and prepares documentation explaining data source, trends, comparisons, and business knowledge discoveries with the objective of providing meaningful data which contributes toward strategic decision-making.

• Reporting: Ensures the development and delivery of reporting tools as required by executives and managers to serve operational and strategic management needs. Validates and ensures data quality that helps users to gain insights and make better fact-based business decisions.

• Promotion and change management: Plays a key role amongst managers to promote the value of Business Intelligence and for embedding cultural changes related to the utilization of relevant Business Intelligence tools that support operational and strategic decision making.

• Continuous improvement: Ensure relevant technologies and best practices are employed which support effective and efficient budgeting, variance analysis, forecasting and reporting processes. Promotes innovation and continuous improvement.

• Risk Management: Monitors and manages all risks and issues in plans and requirements and works in collaboration with other experts responsible for business contingency plans across the University to take appropriate action to mitigate and resolve them.

What you will bring:

• University degree in Business, Computer Science, Information Technology or a related field or an equivalent combination of education and experience.

• Minimum 5 years’ experience in a complex and diverse environment demonstrating experience in project planning, risk analysis and project management, preferably in a finance environment.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and an ability to present to committees and senior leaders.

• A certification in project management would be an asset.

• Expert knowledge of financial systems, business processes and management systems, and of business intelligence tools (Workday an asset).

• Demonstrated experience in developing financial and operational reports (like HR/ payroll reports).

• Experience in managing large multiple, cross-functional activities or projects that span multiple years.

• Demonstrated capacity to provide high level analyses in complex situations and to offer strategic insights for decision making.

• Good analytical and research abilities, critical thinking and attention to detail.

• Client oriented and with an ability to lead and manage change.

• Bilingualism – French and English (spoken and written).

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Key Competencies at uOttawa:
Here are the required competencies for all or our employees at uOttawa:

Planning: Organize in time a series of actions or events in order to realize an objective or a project. Plan and organize own work and priorities in regular daily activities.
Initiative: Demonstrate creativity and initiative to suggest improvements and encourage positive results. Is proactive and self-starting. Show availability and willingness to go above and beyond whenever it is possible.
Client Service Orientation: Help or serve others to meet their needs. This implies anticipating and identifying the needs of internal and external clients and finding solutions on how to meet them.
Teamwork and Cooperation: Cooperate and work well with other members of the team to reach common goal(s). Accept and give constructive feedback. Able to adjust own behaviour to reach the goals of the team.