Strategic Program Manager

As the SAP Global Customer Engagement & Services organization, we help customers to innovate fast and realize the business benefits from their SAP investments. We are looking for a Strategic Program Manager to focus on our largest strategic accounts in the AME region. She/he needs to have the qualification and business acumen to manage large scale, high risk, accounts, stakeholders and delivery teams that span organizational and national boundaries including multiple business units and multiple service partners/vendors. This is to be performed based on the business strategy and the desired results: customer value driven, outcome oriented, in-scope, on-budget, on-schedule, and consistent with quality standards. 

What You'll Do:

• Manage Strategic Customer Engagements directly
• Sponsor of Strategic Customer Strategy
• Defining a Framework on best practices and the GCE&S Cloud Transformation which supports the Region to
• Deliver customer outcome and to satisfy the important customers
• Liaise and coordinate with regional/global Customer Success/Customer Success Stakeholders 
• Pro-active, problem solving, "can-do" attitude and “customer first” mindset.
• Ability to de-escalate customers by ordering, structuring, and bringing in the management's attention to a major incident or a problem

The SAP Strategic Program Manager is responsible for supporting our customer’s transformation strategy through the management of cloud, on-premise or hybrid implementation initiatives. Most projects will utilize

agile/activate methodologies. She/he has the qualifications and business acumen to manage large-scale strategic projects that span organizational boundaries including multiple business units and service partners.

She/he develops into providing leadership to cross-functional teams responsible for delivering defined project outputs to time, budget and project quality criteria. Furthermore, the new colleague is responsible for

the success of assigned projects by ensuring adherence to SAP’s Activate project management methodology and best business practices, provides mentoring to the project team members, status communication and

updates both to the customer and SAP management.

Purpose

As a crucial part of SAP's total solution delivery strategy, SAP focuses on the overall success of customers' SAP solutions.

You Will:

Sales Cycle

• Build credibility / trust with customers
• Assist the SAP license sales and service sales teams in closing of software or services deals by providing oversight on implementation planning & estimating and coordinating multiple SAP Lines of Businesses and partners as required (Bid Management).

Delivery

• Set-up and lead all phases of the project lifecycle, including planning, design, development, testing, implementation, documentation, training, and closure.
• Work with Customer Stakeholders, Partners and SAP Management to effectively manage and lead projects to ensure successful completion and significant impact on customer business KPI.
• During implementations, manage overall services relationship, steering committee and project office, between customer, partner and SAP to ensure that projects are delivered on-time, within budget and with the highest levels of customer satisfaction through billable consulting.
•  Manage expectations on the development of solid project plans, with milestones and clear deliverables (in IT and business terms), handling risks, issues and objections.
•  Select, direct and develop your team members in accordance with the project goals.
• Willingness to travel also internationally. Oversees the customer engagement journey and ensures effective governance and alignment across multiple internal and external stakeholders such as SAP Services, SAP Product support, Partners and customer’s System Integrators or other Hosting Partners
• Actively oversees and drives cloud transformation agenda with key client stakeholders
• Maximize the customer success by helping to manage complexity, ensure stable operations, mitigate risk and lowering total cost of operation, support customers on their journey to the intelligent enterprise
• Continually tries new and better ways to do things and actively brings a broader lens of customer and risk management into their decision making
• Perform administrative tasks required to manage the engagement (staffing, reporting & controlling)
• Actively participate in the governance meetings with customers and other SAP stakeholders (extended account team) and provides direction to the teams on delivery
• Ensures effective end-to-end customer engagement and governance is applied across including commercial arrangements (costs and profitability), customer expectations, delivery team success, customer reporting
• Enable delivery teams to Deliver best through proactive mindset and de-escalate critical customer situations
• Enable regular customer satisfaction feedback
• Enable SAP delivery teams to protect and grow engagement scope, leverage and cross-sell opportunities and manage commercial change requests 
• Participate in team-internal knowledge sharing and coach other team members 
• Effectively communicate complex ideas and persuade clients to adopt the recommended solution
• Provide consultative expertise to the client, including guiding clients through key decisions and tradeoffs to maintain project scope and timeline
• Provide updates on client statuses and escalate issues while maintaining control of the project
• Stay organized and deliver on commitments, including updating any project tracking systems, maintain data hygiene and fulfilling administrative responsibilities

Value Creation

• Create long term value roadmaps and plans with customer to achieve customer business objectives.
•  Analyze and execute on strategic projects, build consensus among project stakeholders, ensure alignment of project tactics with corporate strategy and communicate project goals at a strategic level as well as actively identifying and developing more business opportunities.
• Oversees the customer engagement journey and ensures effective governance and alignment across multiple internal and external stakeholders such as SAP Services, SAP Product support, Partners and customer’s System Integrators or other Hosting Partners.
• Maximize the customer success by helping to manage complexity, ensure stable operations, mitigate risk and lowering total cost of operation, support customers on their journey to the intelligent enterprise.

What You Bring: 

• Master's degree, preferably in finance, commerce, engineering, information technologies, computer science, MBA or equivalent
• Excellent knowledge of project management methodologies. SAP methodologies (including SAP Activate and SAP Solution Manager).
• Proactive attitude in managing stakeholder satisfaction to position and secure customer success
• Demonstrated ability to command the attention and respect of senior level leaders and confidently make presentations to large and executive audiences
• The candidate must possess experience managing a number of internal and external stakeholders, so interpersonal skills and abilities will be vital to succeed in this role
• Team oriented: ability to build strong relationships at every level of the organization. Being a strong motivator who knows how to influence others to deliver consistently their best work
• Excellent written and verbal communication and presentation skills – fluent in English, another language, is beneficial
• PMP certification or other project management certifications are desirable
• Results-driven / Self-organized / Decision making
• Knowledge of one or more functional business processes (Logistic, Finance, etc.)   
• S/4 implementation experience in any industry required
• Industry expertise in the Regulated Industries market (supply chain, manufacturing, Federal financials, Federal procurement, utilities – ISU, EAM, SEW, State & Local) highly preferred
• Working knowledge of SAP products and capabilities
• Experience as a C-Level influencer, strategist, trusted advisor
• Sales support and business development
• SAP messaging – Cloud, AI, RISE, Clean Core
• Portfolio management
• Project/program management
• Project financials
• Organizational financials
• Revenue forecasting
• Mentoring

Your Work Experience:

• Proven project management experience at a consulting / system integration company.
• Ideally 15+ years project management experience (SAP software) with numerous large scale implementations (> 5 Mio. $).
• Demonstrated ability to scope, structure and manage medium- to large scale, medium to high complex projects with modern delivery mixes on time, on budget and within quality criteria that maximized business benefits for customers
• Demonstrated experience in managing, aligning and working with various levels within a customer organization (project, business, executive) as well as different parts of large global organizations
• Excellent customer focus / Networking / Relationship Building
• Results-driven / Self-organized / Decision making
• Knowledge of one or more functional business processes (Logistic, Finance, etc.)
• S/4 implementation experience – multiple projects preferred but not required providing their experience is on a large project on which they played a significant role
• Some amount of Regulated Industries experience – (Utilities and A&D preferred)
• Prior Delivery Executive or Managing Director experience 
• Fluent in English