Program Readiness Lead (Readiness Lead)

Position: Program Readiness Lead (Readiness Lead)
Location: Boston, MA - Hybrid (Onsite 4 days per month)
Job Type: Contract
Duration: 12 months to start

Position Summary
The Program Readiness Lead (Readiness Lead) will oversee a team of readiness liaisons and work closely with agency representatives and software integrator (SI) staff. This role includes preparing agencies for the implementation of the new financials solution, assessing their readiness to adopt changing business practices and procedures, and providing agencies support throughout the process. The team will include 8-12 readiness/adoption coordinators that will work directly with agencies on readiness tasks.

• The Readiness Lead plays a crucial role in the program due to anticipated changes in business processes with the introduction of the new financial solution.
• This role requires a demonstrated success and a deep understanding of change management principles, processes, methodologies, and tools along with strong organizational, analytical and communication skills.
• Additionally, the Readiness Lead should possess the skills to motivate and supervise others, build and foster trusted relationships with stakeholders, agency leaders, employees, and the program team.
• The Readiness Lead works under the direction of the Change Management Lead and is responsible for creating and managing the end-user readiness strategy and plan. This involves gaining a comprehensive understanding of the new business processes implemented with the new solution and identifying differences from current practice.
• Additionally, the Readiness Lead and Readiness Team play a key role in assisting agencies currently using other applications to support agency functionality that will now be offered in the new solution to understand and adopt the new enterprise-wide model.
• The Readiness Lead will work with the Change Management and Communications Leads to effectively communicate the Program's vision and rationale to agency leadership and the end-user community.
• This collaboration aims to promote successful understanding and adoption of the new solution and associated processes across the enterprise.
• Working with the Operations/System Administration Lead, the Readiness Lead will coordinate the process to provision end-users with security roles.
• This position will ensure that agency security requests adhere to best practices governing data access controls, and align with appropriate user roles and responsibilities.
• The Readiness Lead will be responsible for timely communication dissemination and collaborating with over 150 agencies to assess their readiness for go live.
• This will involve maintaining a comprehensive required checklist of tasks, including end-user training, security provisioning, ensuring successful trial access to the new solution, and verifying system requirements for desktops or other set up necessary for optimal solution utilization.
• Working with the Solution Technical Lead, the Readiness Lead will maintain a list of technical tasks to be completed by each agency required for go-live.
• These tasks include items such as interfaces to/from the new solution, data warehouse queries or extracts, and reports that the agency will need to run from the online system.
• The Readiness Lead must be able to communicate clearly and concisely with diverse audiences, in both oral and written contexts, and should be comfortable giving and receiving feedback.

Specific Duties
Working under the direction of the Change Management Lead, the Readiness Lead will:

• Develop a readiness engagement plan that details tasks necessary to ensure successful agency and end-user preparation for adopting the new solution, assign agencies to Readiness Coordinators, create a team of agency "champions" to collaborate with the Readiness Team in preparing their organizations for change, security provisioning steps and other tasks as needed.
• Work with Program Management Office workstreams including Organizational Change Management, Financial, Technical and the SI/product vendor to develop a deep understanding of new or changing business processes.
• Work with technical teams to maintain a list of technical tasks that must be completed prior to go live including items such as interfaces to/from the new solution, data warehouse queries or extracts, and reports agencies will need to run from the online system.
• Understand the desktop system requirements for optimal performance of the new solution.
• Work closely with agencies to understand their use of specific applications that offer functionality not currently available in MMARS. Promote adoption of new enterprise-wide functionality offered by the new Financials solution.
• Create and conduct change readiness assessments to evaluate agency readiness, inform updates to the program plan and rollout/deployment strategy. Ensure change readiness activities are integrated into the program plan.
• Oversee the work of Readiness Liaisons to apply a structured approach to complete change readiness interviews, assess the change impact for each agency, and outline strategy for addressing change impacts.
• Coordinate agency change readiness activities and deliverables in collaboration with agency "champions".
• Create agency- specific readiness plans that include communications dissemination, organizational/operational readiness, technical readiness, end-user security provisioning, and training.
• Provide regular timely reports on challenges, foreseeable problems, anticipated issues, and potential risks along with alternative solutions and mitigation plans.
• Develop and maintain effective relationships with program team members, agency employees, and stakeholders.
• Coordinate efforts with other team members.
• Work with agency "champions" to provide post-implementation support, identify issues, and mitigate risks.

Required Skills

• Extensive experience working with organizations of size similar to assess impacts, identify changes needed, and implement an action plan to move from current 'as-is' process to new 'to-be' process.
• Experienced manager with the ability to oversee, coach and motivate others and provide timely and effective feedback to achieve and sustain desired levels of performance.
• Experience with transformational change initiatives and how to prepare people for technology change.
• Strong analytic, problem solving and root cause identification skills.
• Good business acumen and understanding of organizational issues and challenges.
• Excellent interview skills with the ability to actively listen, analyze and synthesize information.
• Well-developed presentation, communication (oral and written) and interpersonal skills.
• Ability to assess priorities and operate in a flexible manner to meet the dynamic needs of the program.
• Demonstrated experience in using computer-based tools including Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Power Point, Visio, and Outlook).
• Travel to different state agencies may be required.
• The successful candidate will demonstrate an energetic, proactive approach to work, who tracks and follows up on tasks independently, who seeks out additional work, and who recommends improvements to current processes.

Preferred Skills

• Basic understanding of the following Financials functions particularly in large public sector organizations
• Sophisticated Chart of Accounts to support budget controls and reporting across multiple units or organizations
• GAAP reporting
• Federal Grants Management
• Project Management
• Asset and Inventory Tracking and Management
• Procurement and Contracting
• Billing and Accounts Receivable
• Data Reporting and Analytics

Minimum Entrance Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in related field with 3 - 5 years' experience with change management coordination in a large- scale organization
• Understanding and experience with the basics of business process mapping.