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Client Practice Lead

Rationale

As a Client Practice Lead you will be an egoless leader of a defined set of Infinity Works accounts, with the Account Leads reporting to you. You will be responsible for implementing Infinity Works services and strategies within those accounts and accountable for the success of those engagements. This role was previously called Managing Consultant and was renamed for consistency with other roles.

You will be a member of a group of Client Practice Leads, reporting to the Technology Director (who is tasked with the effective management of all accounts in your region).

Essentially the role of Client Practice Lead enables our ambitions to be Customer Delivery First, Technically Excellent, Focussed on our People and Clear, Honest & Trustworthy.

This role can be carried out by those at career level CL7 Principal and above.

Experience and skills

  • Proven ability at Senior Consultant level or above, having worked on several client accounts in a range of business domains.
  • Proven ability to influence, lead and empower others.
  • Has maintained client relationships with senior stakeholders.
  • Proven ability to grow, lead, maintain and motivate large teams.
  • Passionate about all aspects of solution delivery with a thirst to learn.
  • Passionate about applying technology and effective ways of working to solve business problems.
  • Commercial acumen with the ability to land, grow and run client engagements.
  • Pragmatic and focussed with solid evaluation and decision-making skills.

Key objectives

Ensure client deliverables are of sufficient quality

You will be accountable for both the technical quality and effective delivery of all client work within your accounts. There will be too many accounts for you to cover them all yourself, so you will need to rely on Account Leads, Delivery Leads and Tech Leads to help with this. You should know what is happening on each of your accounts, the risks and issues, and how they're being addressed.

You'll need to ensure that your team has the right set of skills and experience to oversee all your accounts, whilst ensuring the appropriate levels of governance are in place and adhered to.

Ensure staff engagement, development and progression

You will be accountable for the management, mentoring, support, development and reward of all staff in your accounts. This will be a significant number of people and you will need to rely on Account Leads to help you keep in touch with the engagement, performance and development needs of the wider team and provide regular effective feedback.

People Operations provide supporting frameworks and models to help support and develop employees during their time at Infinity Works and you are encouraged to use them. You will work with Account Leads and People Operations to promote and reward employees in line with their development. Where there are any issues, you will resolve them in collaboration with People Operations and the relevant Account Lead.

The role in detail

Role Essentials

  • The Client Practice Lead is still part of the delivery team at Infinity Works and will, where necessary, devote time to working in a hands-on capacity on a customer engagement. The expectation is that you will spend approximately 50% of your time in a billable role.
  • You will champion Infinity Works' ways of working, with a bias towards taking action and delivering successful outcomes for customers.
  • You will occasionally be the first person on a new engagement, using your specialist skills to establish solid relationships, better understand the challenges of the engagement, establish effective ways of working and deliver results.
  • You will continue to develop your professional skills to ensure you can effectively support colleagues with help and advice.
  • You will be based wherever necessary to achieve your objectives. This will typically be at a client site or an Infinity Works office. This may include national or international travel from time to time.

Responsibilities

Customer Engagements

  • You'll work with Account Leads to ensure the smooth day-to-day running of accounts.
  • You'll proactively monitor all engagements under your care, working with Account Leads to ensure that any issues are quickly detected and pragmatically resolved.
  • You'll be accountable for ensuring Account Leads have a documented strategy for their account and it is effectively implemented.
  • You'll be accountable for ensuring that Account Leads have a record of the state of delivery quality for their account. This documentation must be shareable with the customer and you will work with Account Leads to ensure that this is accurate, relevant, timely and effectively communicated with all relevant stakeholders.
  • Where quality is low, you'll work with the Account Lead to make improvements. This includes joining the account where appropriate to lend support. You will escalate issues to the Technical Director where engagements are not improving.
  • You'll work with your Account Leads to publicise and celebrate successful engagements.
  • You'll ensure that we reflect regularly on our approach, we learn from our mistakes and we continue to evolve and improve our working processes.

Employees

  • You'll ensure the engagements under your care maintain happy, motivated and healthy employees by listening to their needs and supporting them in their personal and professional development. You'll ensure employees are getting regular feedback from their Account Lead, and where necessary, you.
  • You'll understand and explain the frameworks, models and tools created by People Operations. You'll encourage their use, but be aware they are not mandatory. Individuals are always accountable for their careers.
  • You'll ensure career conversations are regularly taking place to support team members with progressing in their career, and where appropriate, work with Account Leads to promote employees and work with the Local board to improve their rewards and remuneration.
  • Where behaviour and performance don't meet the expected standards, you will work with People Operations to ensure issues are addressed in line with company policies.
  • You will manage, mentor, support and coach Account Leads to help them develop themselves and their teams, regularly meeting face to face.
  • You'll engage in the hiring process to ensure the quality bar for our new hires remains high and the Infinity Works culture is promoted and evolves positively.

Communication

  • You'll provide Infinity Works management information on the health of each engagement under your care. You'll make this available within Infinity Works and share it with customers when required.
  • With the support of the Account Lead, you will share a summary of the career direction and progression of the people under your care with the Local Board.
  • You'll work with the Account Lead, People Lead and Local board to improve engagement when you believe an employee is at risk of leaving Infinity Works.
  • You'll ensure that knowledge does not become siloed and share effective ways of working and other learnings from your accounts consistently across the company.
  • You will work with other Client Practice Leads to share good practices to identify and solve recurring issues.
  • Our engineering culture is well documented. You will live the culture yourself. You will be responsible for bringing the culture to life, making it a core part of how Infinity Works teams in your region conduct themselves. You will need to know where we're falling short of our aspirations and be able to address this.

Company

  • You'll support local Board Members by helping implement local business strategies and service offerings.
  • You'll support the Commercial and Talent teams with recruitment, placement and business development activities.
  • You'll work alongside other Client Practice Leads to ensure that we apply group-wide thinking to our engagements and people.
  • You'll work with the Account Lead to ensure SoW's, timesheets, invoices and all other elements of effective account governance are performed promptly.
  • You'll work alongside our ISO committee to ensure we remain ISO compliant.
  • You'll ensure that all mandatory training is completed on time.

Relationships

Regional Board

The high-level strategies, initiatives and commercial plans etc will come from your Regional Board, so you will need to work with them to understand how best to implement their direction.

Regional Technology Director

You will report directly to your regional Technology Director who will set your specific objectives and support you in your personal and professional development.

Other Client Practice Leads

These people are your peers across the company and share the same responsibilities. They are the people you need to work closely with, supporting one another and presenting an aligned and effective approach to getting the job done.

Engineering Practice Leads

These will be key people to enable you to achieve your goals and meet your responsibilities for high-quality, effective delivery. They are the specialists who know what good looks like and can help your accounts apply the right technologies and techniques to get the job done.

Account Leads

These will be key people to enable you to achieve your goals and meet your responsibilities. They represent the people who get things done and run accounts day to day, so having these people onside is key.

People Ops

People Ops have established frameworks for dealing with the whole range of staff engagement, support and development situations. You will work with them to make sure people-related things are done clearly, consistently and effectively.

ISO

You'll carry out your role in accordance with the requirements of ISO9001 and ISO27001 as reflected in the Company's policies and procedures and the ISO9001 and ISO27001 organisational structure charts.