Senior Manager, HR Applications and Support

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Position purpose:

Reporting to the Director of HR and Finance Applications and Support, leads the strategy, delivery, and continuous improvement of the University’s HR applications, ensuring systems are reliable, scalable, and aligned with institutional priorities and business needs. Provides overall direction for application management, enhancement roadmaps, and service delivery, with a strong focus on optimizing performance, enhancing the user experience, and maximizing value.

Leads a multidisciplinary team of experts responsible for system configuration, reporting, support, and innovation. Fosters a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement, enabling high-quality service delivery and ensuring responsiveness to evolving operational demands. Partners with business leaders and stakeholders to translate strategic objectives and operational requirements into effective, sustainable technology solutions that improve efficiency and support informed decision-making.

Drives the prioritization and execution of initiatives in a dynamic environment with competing demands, balancing immediate operational needs with long-term strategic goals. Ensures strong governance, effective change management, and the successful delivery of system enhancements and reporting capabilities. Monitors system performance, service levels, and user satisfaction to identify opportunities for optimization, innovation, and ongoing improvement.

In this job, your responsibilities will include:

• Team leadership: Manages a team of business analysts and technical experts. Provides administrative and technical direction to its team and ensures its applications’ development, configuration, maintenance, and improvement, and support of users with the highest standards. Recruits staff, drives performance, identifies development needs, mentors, and recommends appropriate training strategies. Promotes a positive work environment, adaptability, and a culture of continuous improvement, and resolves conflicts as needed.
• Workload and project management: Plans and monitors operational pipelines and projects by leading, supervising, negotiating, and coordinating the efforts of multiple interdisciplinary stakeholders. Establishes operational dashboards, project plans, project management structures, and control methodologies so requests and projects are completed on time and, if applicable, within budget. Ensures that risks are monitored and that risk mitigation strategies (including critical path analysis) are implemented when necessary.
• Process management: Oversees the design of system workflows by using expert knowledge to match business requirements to technology options. Performs business process analysis techniques and collaborates with internal and external stakeholders to deliver value-added solutions while optimizing controls, standardization, and efficiency. Applies the concepts and principles of change management, ensures that appropriate communication strategies are put in place with respect to operational pipelines, new projects and business process changes. 
• System changes: Collaborates and works proactively with technical and business stakeholders (at all levels) to benchmark, review, recommend and execute developments to meet business needs and manage expectations. Builds business cases (as needed). Understands system interdependencies, aligns with other sectors on preventing cross-system or cross-module issues, and implements testing strategies. Once a change is approved, ensures the adoption of change and project management techniques and regular updates to business stakeholders.
• Continuous improvements: Stays abreast of new technology, work methods, and techniques associated with its application portfolio. Proactively seeks opportunities to learn and leverage new market trends and emerging technologies and seeks the input of subject matter experts to understand their applicability. In collaboration with IT experts, builds the deployment, testing, and migration (if applicable) strategies around changes, releases, and improvements. Oversees the execution and communication of improvements and ensures a successful transition from testing to production environments. 
• User support and training: Maintains and strengthens relationships with key stakeholders and is a key point of contact for escalated questions and concerns. Allocates the resources to train and support end-users and maintain user guides and videos. Supports change management and communication initiatives and ensures the team has a customer-service excellence culture. 
• Reporting: Enables decision-making for faculties and services by allocating and coordinating the resources needed to create system reports that ensure strategic and operational effectiveness and efficiency. 
• Vendor management: Owns the relationship with the technology providers of its application ecosystem and oversees the recurrent interactions between the providers and its team. Supports annual business reviews with technology providers to ensure their performance, and promotes synergy between the two parties.

What you will bring:

• University degree in Computer Science, Management Information Systems (MIS), Business Administration, Commerce, or a related discipline or an equivalent combination education and work experience.
• Five (5) years of experience in leadership roles supporting large scale systems implementation and maintenance with a proven track record in Business Analysis, System Analysis, Process Analysis, and customer support.
• Advanced business knowledge of Human Resources processes and operations.
• Demonstrated experience and advance knowledge of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and/or similar HR solutions and its related processes and principles (Workday is a strong asset).
• Strong understanding and experience of the end-to-end ERP implementation and product life cycle.
• Analytical, critical and business oriented thinking to conceptualize organizational changes, business processes and agreements.
• Experience designing, implementing, and supporting integrated business processes.
• Experience working in a diverse work environment, with a broad understanding of multiple business sectors.
• Proven abilities in building partnerships and/or collaborative working relationships with a wide variety of internal and external stakeholders.
• Excellent ability to co-ordinate a variety of tasks under pressure, managing priorities, meeting strict deadlines and following up on deliverables.
• Knowledge of change-management principles.
• Demonstrated initiative, autonomy and excellent leadership skills to foster commitment and cooperation within a team.
• Knowledge of data and information management practices, and IT security with an ability to communicate technical concepts in a non-technical manner (ability to vulgarize).
• Ability to proactively keep abreast of new and emerging trends and technologies in ERP for HR.
• Bilingualism – French and English (written and spoken).

Key Competencies at uOttawa:
Here are the required competencies for all or our employees at uOttawa: 
Planning: Organize in time a series of actions or events in order to realize an objective or a project. Plan and organize own work and priorities in regular daily activities.
Initiative: Demonstrate creativity and initiative to suggest improvements and encourage positive results. Is proactive and self-starting. Show availability and willingness to go above and beyond whenever it is possible.
Client Service Orientation: Help or serve others to meet their needs. This implies anticipating and identifying the needs of internal and external clients and finding solutions on how to meet them.
Teamwork and Cooperation: Cooperate and work well with other members of the team to reach common goal(s). Accept and give constructive feedback. Able to adjust own behaviour to reach the goals of the team.
The University of Ottawa embraces diversity and inclusion in the workplace. We are passionate about our people and committed to employment equity. We foster a culture of respect, teamwork and inclusion, where collaboration, innovation, and creativity fuel our quest for research and teaching excellence. While all qualified persons are invited to apply, we welcome applications from qualified Indigenous persons, racialized persons, persons with disabilities, women and LGBTQIA2S+ persons. The University is committed to creating and maintaining an accessible, barrier-free work environment. The University is also committed to working with applicants with disabilities requesting accommodation during the recruitment, assessment and selection processes. Applicants with disabilities may contact [email protected] to communicate the accommodation need. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority.
Note: if this is a union position: The hiring process will be governed by the current collective agreement related to the union affiliation noted above; you can click here to find out more.
If this is a front-line position with responsibilities to interact with students, selected candidates must be rated at the Low Advanced proficiency level or higher for both oral comprehension and reading comprehension in their second official language. The rating is determined by a proficiency test designed by the Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute.

Prior to May 1, 2022, the University required all students, faculty, staff, and visitors (including contractors) to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 as defined in Policy 129 – Covid-19 Vaccination. This policy was suspended effective May 1, 2022 but may be reinstated at any point in the future depending on public health guidelines and the recommendations of experts.