Area Workforce Planning

As the Area Capability Lead, you are responsible for driving Area’s talent readiness, scheduling, chargeability, recovery, and operational excellence across Talent Communities in alignment with Solution Area demand. In this role, you will require a strong connection to our ATC (offshore) leadership, teams and resources as they form a significant part of our people, solution and delivery models. Additionally, you must have an expert understanding of our solutions and delivery methods and capabilities to ensure our clients receive the best experience.

Your role is operationally critical, as it enables required capacity for Solution Area leads to focus on growth and delivery and creates a critical link between Solution Areas, Talent Communities, and Region Leadership. You will be responsible to leading and supporting innovative solutions required to enable required capability and capacity such as the Microsoft Academy. Overall, you will be a key leader in the Growth Markets, working very closely day-to-day with the Regional WPELs, and is the key driver for effective workforce planning and strategy.

**Key Role Responsibilities**:
**Day-to-day, you will**:

- Partner with Solution Area, Talent Community, and Regional leaders to define and fulfill talent needs within assigned groups.
- Identify and drive consistent, integrated processes to manage resource chargeability optimization within and across Solution Areas, Talent Communities, Regions and Area.
- Support effective management and deployment of bench resources to assess readiness and optimize chargeability based on business need and employee desires.
- Facilitate training attendance to meet skill demands and training plans within Area, while balancing project demands and overall chargeability goals; active in defining training needs and setting training goals (e.g., certification numbers), and partnering with Region WPELs, TCs and HR on course development as required
- Lead development, implementation and evaluation of overall Growth Markets-specific workforce strategy, evaluating against defined metrics, in partnership with Regions and Solution Area Leads.
- Translate defined and changing go to-market strategies into workforce planning initiatives and operations
- Lead analysis of productivity and chargeability of resources to identify chargeability/recovery gaps and issues
- Lead analysis and forecasting of resource supply and demand to support project and workforce planning
- Deliver key metrics reporting (productivity, training, supply and demand metrics) to Solution Area, Talent Community, and Area/Region leaders to support decision-making.
- Support Finance in identifying areas of cost control based on resource training budget (internal, external) and approved internal expenses
- Take responsibility for supporting communications relevant to organizational workforce initiatives
- Mentor, interacts with, solicit feedback from, and support Regional workforce planning & Execution Leads
- Consider the perspective of the employee and overall employee engagement in strategy development, implementation
- Lead efforts to provide career guidance and support to Avanade employees, securing organizational commitment and building a healthy organizational culture
- Support Talent Community-centric activities, fostering a positive, developmental and engaged employee culture
- Support foundational people-centric initiatives and activities: terminations, performance improvement plans, calibration, performance reviews, career management activities, etc.
- Support smooth transitions of resources between big strategic projects and the bench, including Day 1 project onboarding and readiness

Key Role Skill & Capability Requirements
- Extensive functional knowledge or track record operating in an operations enablement role in a consulting environment with direct reports
- Experience managing aspects of resource deployment and mobilization to meet business objectives and client demands
- Strong knowledge of Avanade solutions and delivery methods and processes
- Prior work experience identifying and forecasting resourcing needs based on skillset demand in the Region, collaborating closely with core partner business units
- Strong quantitative skills and experience analyzing, synthesizing staffing metrics such as availability, demand, chargeability and sourcing forecast
- Outstanding communication and presentation skills.
- Ability to deliver strong messages to encourage and ensure compliance with Avanade's processes and procedures
- Demonstrated ability to drive executive level discussions related to chargeability forecasts and business/talent leads are alerted to potential shortcomings in forecast
- Detailed understanding of capabilities, credentials, certifications and other education and background needs of staff to deliver successful engagements
- Demonstrated ability to operate in a complex, matrixed organization within a fast-paced environment