Description
Position at MTA Headquarters
Job Title: Deputy Chief, Agile & Citizen Product Group
Salary Range: $132,094 – $173,373
Points: 1182
Dept/Div: IT/IT Product Management
Supervisor: Chief Enterprise Applications
Location: 2 Broadway New York, NY 10004
Hours of Work: 8:30 AM – 5:00 PM (7.5 hours/day)
This position is eligible for telework which is currently two days per week. New hires are eligible to apply 30 days after their effective date of hire.
The Deputy Chief, Agile & Citizen Product Group is responsible for three teams led by Product Directors (L-3 Level Managers): Agile Delivery Product Team, Citizen Development Product Team and Software Engineering Platform Product Team. The Deputy Chief, in essence owns the product life cycle for these product lines. The Deputy Chief will provide overall leadership to the assigned group in an agile transformation and drive the digital agenda and roadmaps for application and/or infrastructure products. This position will manage a team of product directors with agile coaches responsible for defining the launch of new products and services, developing technical roadmaps for existing and new products and delivering product features in an agile environment. The following paragraphs provide a description of the three product lines that will report into this group.
The Agile Delivery Product Line will lead a team that will help transition our business from its existing work practices to a truly integrated agile methodology. The team will help to analyze the organizations current processes as it relates to agile and implement improvements to help streamline processes and create efficiencies. Ultimately, the team will establish a center of excellence and play a key role in the long-term strategy across the entire organization, helping our teams to deliver better products in a faster, more efficient way.
The Citizen Development Product Line will set the direction for low code development, provide oversight and code reviews, as well as establish the rules of engagement and clear boundaries for development for Citizen Developers. The team will develop an adaptive governance framework to mitigate shadow IT risks by working with business unit leaders to enlist Citizen Developers to provide application development standards and guidance in various low-code platforms, to perform code reviews and to provide general support. The Citizen Product Team will lead a team of application development professionals that will manage the low-code platforms and work directly with the Citizen Development community.
The Software Engineering Platform Product line establishes the application development standards, secure coding techniques, and design patterns and methodologies for all development platforms. Currently, the Enterprise Product team maintains applications on more than 25 development platforms (.NET, .net core, React Native, Azure, Azure Webapps & Serverless functions, AWS, C#, C++, Java, Cobol AS400, Crystal Reports, Angular Node JS, WordPress, Visual Basic, Python, Oracle PeopleSoft PeopleCode, MS Dynamics, focus (Micro and WebFocus), Oracle forms, Drupal (PhP), PL/SQL, etc.). Our goal is to consolidate, modernize and standardize on as few platforms as possible taking into account newer technology in the cloud (Azure, AWS, Google and Oracle).
The Deputy Chief is responsible for management, staffing and supervision of the assigned products within the assigned product lines.
This position also entails developing and maintaining highly effective, secure, and innovative information systems to support the MTA’s goals and priorities.
Enterprise Product Planning
- Lead a team of product directors responsible for creating transformation roadmaps with long and short-term plans for new and improved processes and policies. Manage product managers in the development of backlog management and user-story build-out.
- Lead others that will consist of one or more agile coaches, data analytic researchers and other digital transformation personnel.
Leadership
- Provide leadership in development of inter-team communication and cohesiveness; sustain culture and supporting staff during organizational growth/changes.
- Provide direction on evaluation, selection, implementation and maintenance of information systems, ensuring appropriate investment in strategic and operational systems.
Human Resource Management
- Attract, develop, coach and retain high-performance team members, empowering them to elevate their level of responsibility, span of control and performance in conjunction with the IT Workforce Planning & Workload Management office.
- Build Product manager expertise and competence to meet evolving demands within the Enterprise Product Management unit.
Financial Management
- Demonstrate consistent understanding of funding, communications and systems; recommend timelines and resources needed to achieve the program goals.
- Maintain contact with key IT suppliers and collaborates with IT Business Management Services to identify procurement contracts to support program related activities.
Strategy & Planning
- Directs the development of Information Technology products and plans related to the assigned product group area of responsibility including funding requirements and project schedules to be presented to the various customer executives and governance bodies.
- Identifies opportunities for the appropriate and cost-effective investment in IT systems and resources, including staffing, sourcing, purchasing, and in-house development for the assigned product group area of responsibility.
- Participates in the development and execution of a disaster recovery and business continuity plan for products managed.
- Assesses and makes recommendations on the improvement and re-engineering related to the assigned product group area of responsibility and work with the stakeholders throughout the MTA at keeping the total cost of ownership down.
- Ensures products are developed and maintained with data integrity and security for personal and proprietary information and related intellectual property.
- Promote the use of employee self -service and mobile connectivity for all products to reduce the reliance of paper sent to the document management center and manual data entry.
Acquisition & Deployment
- Coordinates and facilitates consultation with stakeholders to define business and systems requirements for new technology implementations, developing business case and cost justifications for such initiatives.
- Provides direction on evaluation, selection, implementation and maintenance of information systems, ensuring appropriate investment in strategic and operational systems.
- Advises MTA IT management in the changing trends and emerging technology and their potential use within the MTA.
- Directs the development of the analysis required to determine if Information Technology projects should follow a “Build” (develop with in-house staff) or “Buy” (cloud or packaged solution) methodology.
- Directs the development and implementation of new modules within assigned products.
- Advises on the selection, prioritization, development and implementation on applications, infrastructure, and related products.
- Provides direction on evaluation, selection, implementation and maintenance of information systems products, ensuring appropriate investment in strategic and operational systems.
- Attract, develop, coach and retain high-performance team members, empowering them to elevate their level of responsibility, span of control and performance.
- Advises on continued education training programs for employees across MTA IT enabling career development and new technologies knowledge to be acquired by IT staff for use in new technology initiatives.
Management and Oversight
- Participates in overall business planning bringing a current knowledge and future vision of technology and systems as related to the company’s goals.
- Responsible for monitoring product lifecycles, assigned workload, and deliverables ensuring that the IT needs of the MTA are met on time and within budget, including identifying weekly, monthly and annual performance targets to show progress on assigned products.
- Ensure continuous delivery of product services through oversight of service level agreements with end users and monitoring of product performance.
- Participates in the recruitment, development, motivation, training and retention of a diverse and high performing multi-level IT team professionals, conforming to budgetary objectives and Human Resources policy and programs.
- Participates in the development and tracks the annual operation and capital budgets for the product group.
- Develop business case justifications and cost/benefit analyses for IT spending and initiatives keeping customizations to a minimum and total cost of ownership down.
- Advanced knowledge of information, mobile, Voice, Cloud, and Application Development and/or Infrastructure technologies.
- Successful track record in design of software systems to meet the current and future needs of a complex transportation organization or,
- Successful track record in design and implementation of IT Infrastructure and related hardware and software technologies to meet the current and future needs of a complex transportation organization or
- Extensive experience in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, data analysis, data reporting, and statistical process control
- Knowledge of legal and regulatory requirements pertaining to areas supervised
- Exceptional verbal/written communications skills
- Advanced organizational skill, with the ability to create, redesign and/or integrate complex organizational systems
- Financial/budgeting planning and management experience
- Ability to fit in with the constant shifting needs and demands of the business Departments
- Knowledge of low-code development platforms (e.g. Power BI, PowerApps, Salesforce)
- Knowledge of software development and modern application design including API, containers and microservices
- Experience as an Agile Coach or Experience in Scrum, Kanban or Scaled Agile Frameworks (SAFe)
- Ability to showcase examples of implementing agile techniques
- Certifications in cloud architecture and development platforms are a strong plus
- Experience running agile projects of varying size and complexity
- Scrum Coach certification, preferred.
- Scrum Master certification, a strong plus.
- Strong communication and presenting skills
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Business Administration, Engineering, Finance, and Information Services (or the equivalent of education and progressive responsible experience) plus a minimum of 14 years of Information Technology experience with at least 8 years of progressive IT managerial experience.
As an employee of MTA Headquarters you may be required to complete an annual financial disclosure statement with the State of New York, if your position earns more than $108,638 (this figure is subject to change) per year or if the position is designated as a policy maker.
MTA and its subsidiary and affiliated agencies are Equal Opportunity Employers, including with respect to veteran status and individuals with disabilities.
The MTA encourages qualified applicants from diverse backgrounds, experiences, and abilities, including military service members, to apply.