Specialized It Consultant - Intermediate (A1482224)

The Community Services I&IT Cluster (CSC) of the Ontario Public Service serves the Ministries of: Colleges and Universities (MCU), Education (EDU); Municipal Affairs and Housing (MMAH) and Tourism, Culture and Sport (MTCS). DDSB supports the ministries by providing information management tools that help enable public policy decision making, business and strategic planning, program support, comprehensive review and continuous improvement.

The Digital Learning and Visualization Technologies Unit of DDSB works on many different initiatives in the Cloud solution, the Data Collection, Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence area. These tools collect data and transform it into meaningful information, enabling evidence-based strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision-making. Client Ministries have access to historical, current and predictive views of business operations, increasing the analysis capacity of decision makers.

Specialized IT Consultant – Intermediate role will work on Digital Curriculum project at least 70% of the time. It is anticipated that the rest of the time (up to 30%) the role will work on OnSiS projects related tasks.

The digital curriculum and resources platform (DCP) is a key commitment in the 2019 Ontario Economic Outlook and Fiscal Review to create a new digital space that will help educators, parents and students access curriculum and learning resources in a user- and mobile-friendly manner and will become increasingly interactive over time. The digital curriculum and resources platform is a public facing service with a large user base.

The candidate will work under the direction of the Project Manager and the Senior Technical Manager, and will engage directly with managers, team leads, program analysts, business clients and subject matter experts within the business ministry and Community Services I&IT Cluster throughout the engagement.

Responsibilities:

• Works in partnership with clients, advising them on information technology in order to meet their business objectives or overcome problems, work to improve structure and efficiency of an organization’s I&IT systems.
• The I&IT Consultant may be used to provide strategic guidance to organizations with regard to Information Management & IT technology, IT infrastructures and the enablement of major business processes through enhancements to IT.
• Provides subject matter expertise in their field and highly expert technical assistance.
• The I&IT Consultant is responsible for, but not limited to ensuring the team is proactive in completing priorities and deliverables as well as ensuring requirements are well-understood, documented, and accurate.
• Establishes the backlog as a source of truth from which the team can deliver.
• Facilitates and leads in-depth workshops to elicit, review and confirm business requirements, business models, business rules, user, interface design

Requirements

General Skills:

• Anticipates and resolves problems to ensure that the deliverables are completed within budget, to the highest quality, meeting or exceeding expectations
• Provide the quality assurance/quality control of specific deliverables
• Knowledge and understanding of Information Management principles, concepts, policies and practices
• Facilitates and leads in-depth workshops to elicit, review and confirm business requirements, business models, business rules, user, interface design
• Develops processes and procedures for implementing deliverables
• Prepares reports and presentations including options, recommendations, implementation plans, etc.
• Conduct and participate in walkthroughs at each project milestone in accordance with project schedule
• Work in partnership with clients advising them on information technology aspects to meet their business objectives or overcome challenges, and work to improve efficiency of an organization’s I&IT systems
• Acts as the technical advisor/expert on all aspects of a specific deliverable
• Lead a cross functional team of technical solution design and collaborate with program area and external vendors toward implementation of the project scope on time and budget
• Responsible for, but not limited to ensuring the team is proactive in completing priorities and deliverables as well as ensuring requirements are accurate, well-understood, and documented
• Analyzes I&IT requirements giving independent and objective advice on the use of I&IT
• Liaise with IT specialists, unit leads and relevant stakeholders
• Works with clients to define the scope of a project and to determine requirements
• Familiar with change-management principles and methodology

Core Skills:

• Meets with the Product Owner to understand the team’s work
• Analytical and problem-solving skills to assess clients business priorities and needs; to evaluate business and technical design alternatives
• Expert in detailed analysis, conversations, and documentation that all user stories call for
• Experience in transposing requirements/user stories into content design – preferably using a CMS (Content Management System) or DB implemented content.
• Experience assembling requirements into coherent user stories
• Experience establishing the backlog as a source of truth from which the team can deliver
• Requirements documentation experience in the format of concise and clear user stories
• Act as a proxy Product Owner for the team, where the role will answers questions or facilitates decisions on behalf of an absent Product Owner
• Experience in leading and facilitating in-depth workshops to elicit, review and confirm business requirements, business models, business rules, user, interface design.
• Experience with user testing; working with UI/UX designer and other business analysts to plan user testing sessions including screening and recruiting, facilitate user testing sessions, document and present research findings
• Experience in managing the Product Backlog Items, refining them and communicate changes to project manager/Team Lead
• Explain and present very complex technical analyses, options, proposals, reports and recommendations to clients
• Story writer experience, make sure the myriad pieces of information that are discussed during a team standup are included in the stories; details, decisions, and dependencies, are documented in the in the right user story.
• Experience to ensure the team is proactive in completing priorities and deliverables as well as ensuring requirements are accurate, well-understood, and documented
• Breaks epics down into stories and defines acceptance criteria in each story
• Experience with Agile project methodology
• Experience working with data sources such as relational DB or CMS
• Provides the team with the context they need, i.e., what part of The Big Picture they’re working on
• Experience working with both the business users and IT development teams to ensure business requirements are properly reflected in the system design and technical specifications
• Experience to feed work to the team and dedicated to looking ahead at upcoming work and grooming requirements so that they’re well-understood, documented, and ready to go

Technical Skills:

• Experience with design, develop, test and implement systems solutions, and evaluate software/ hardware
• Experience with large projects implementation that use content management systems or relational DB as back-end storage repositories
• Experience with advanced application prototyping using various prototyping tools – e.g. Axure RP7 and above Experience in the analysis and design of Microsoft Azure Cloud Based Applications and advanced workflows based systems.
• Hands-on experience with creating and managing user stories using Microsoft Team Foundation Server and DevOps
• Experience with Agile project methodology
• Working knowledge of business system technologies to provide technical expertise and advice

Communication Skills:

• To prepare systems documentation and manuals;
• To discuss of systems development options and technical processes among project team;
• To discuss with clients, development and operational recommendations given limitations and considerations Writings kills to prepare project reports and presentations to explain analysis and recommendations;
• Establish effective working relationships with I&IT management, clients, internal and external partners/ stakeholders and project staff
• To prepare business cases for recommended approach to systems development or acquisitions;
• To prepare metrics and dashboard reports; and,
• Communication skills to discuss client requirements among other technical team members;
• Strong communication, consultation and interpersonal skills to determine client needs;
• Strong collaboration skills, proven experience of working with solution development, business area and operational departments to ensure all day-to-day priorities/issues are addressed in a timely manner
• Explain technical concepts to non-technical and technical audiences;
• To prepare research finding summary reports

Must Haves:

• Experience in transposing requirements/user stories into content design using a CMS (Content Management System) or DB implemented content.
• Strong communications, consultations and interpersonal skills to determine client needs
• Experience transposing requirements into coherent user stories
• Experience with Agile project methodology
• Experience working with both the business users and IT development teams