Description
As Director of Operations, you hold a key role in Crunch Analytics’ day-to-day operational activities as an advanced data analytics agency. In essence, your task is to create an environment where colleagues deliver projects on time, within budget, and with delighted clients. You ensure that ongoing projects run smoothly and distill lessons learned from previous projects to upgrade our way of working on future projects.
Crunch Analytics has several operational teams that run a data-centric project from start to finish. Those teams have project owners who ensure the delivery of projects on time and within budget. With your experience in IT-project management, you will guide, coach, and follow up with those project owners in achieving excellence. You will supervise invoicing, report KPI’s, and have final responsibility concerning planning. To keep a finger on the pulse, you will additionally act as the project owner on specific key client projects.
As the Director of Operations, you will be a crucial part of the company’s management team. Both your general views on agency matters as well as your specific insights on performance and areas of improvement in operations should help the company continue on its path of growth.
Key responsibilities
- Manage project owners: The team’s project owners (= account managers/project managers)[1] [2] will report to you . In turn, you provide them with the appropriate guidance and assistance where required.
- Refine structure and processes: You evaluate and refine the operational team’s structure & functioning within a rapidly growing organization. You augment current processes to work more efficiently, all while taking into account the geographical dispersion (BE/NL) of teams and the company’s policy on remote work.
- Supervise invoicing: You supervise the invoicing process and guarantee that the process runs smoothly, keeping clients informed on what they can expect.
- Planning: You hold the final responsibility with regard to project planning. You ensure you have a clear view on this ever-moving puzzle and make the appropriate decisions when conflicts arise. You know who is active on what project and what workload is waiting around the corner. Such results from your straightforward communication with operational teams, the commercial team, and HR (recruiting).
- Reporting: You proactively report insights and points of attention to the company’s management team, as well as share periodical KPIs on the organization’s performance.
- Key project ownership: You will assume the role of project owner on a limited number of specific key client projects. Such will enable you to obtain and keep a good understanding of customers’ demands and how we respond to them.
Must-haves
- Experience in managing an operations team: You have a proven track record in both sketching and structuring the project-delivery process within an IT agency environment. You understand how a project-driven organization works and what is needed to achieve profitability in such a structure. You are able to instill trust and stimulate project ownership in a demanding and constantly changing environment.
- Experience with managing IT projects: You have proven experience running and managing the different aspects of a typical IT project. You can pinpoint and avoid typical pitfalls when working on said type of projects with clients. Your eagerness to provide business value combined with technical expertise is what has made you successful in the past.
- Affinity with data-centric projects: To guide and follow up on both project owners and specific key projects, any candidate should have a basic understanding of what data-centric projects are all about. While we do not expect you to be a data scientist, we ask any candidate to demonstrate their affinity with such data-centric projects.
- Experience with reporting: Your experience has taught you how to report on the team’s progress. You know what metrics to track and what topics to address. You can identify the root causes of problems and suggest mitigation strategies to solve said problems.
- Great communication/people skills: You understand the importance of building an excellent relationship between internal teams and clients in an agency environment. You are, therefore, a proactive communicator who is not afraid to have difficult conversations when required. You can transfer a message both concisely or at length and are able to read the room to understand when the first or the latter is appropriate.
Nice to have
- Knowing your way around operational tooling is a definite plus. This includes Asana, Harvest, and Notion as key components.
- As most of our clients are active in retail & e-commerce, understanding the challenges within that sector is a definite plus
Your Profile
You have an MS/BS in Computer Science, Econometrics, Economics, Business Administration, AI, Data or Marketing Analysis, Maths, or Statistics, or equal by experience;
- You are willing to travel (Benelux, Germany)
- You are fluent in Dutch and English
- You are flexible and stress-resistant
- You act as a manager and a coach who loves to share knowledge and help people to grow.
- You have an entrepreneurial mindset (focus, set and adapt priorities, move fast, embrace the change, be flexible).