Practice Manager - Service Delivery

About the Job

The Practice Manager is a senior leadership position reporting into the NA Service Line Director. This is a leadership position in Akamai’s Professional Services team whose time is roughly divided between 70% leading a distributed team of Professional Services Consultants to ensure quality of service delivery to the customers and the operational effectiveness of the team. The remainder 30% should be spent with customers on strategic pre- and post-sales initiatives.

About the Team

The Professional Services team works with Akamai’s customers to design and implement solutions that maximize return on investment, reduce risk, and optimize their online initiatives. The team employs some of the foremost Internet experts to solve complex infrastructure, content delivery, and application performance challenges, always with a mind to our customer’s business strategy. We’ve implemented solutions for over 3,000 customers in the private and public sectors.

Responsibilities:

Leadership

- Manage a team of 10-15 distributed members located in 2-5 regional sales offices. Provide performance coaching and feedback, technical leadership and mentoring to team members.

- Partner with Regional Sales Manager(s) and Service Line leaders to monitor sales pipeline and perform strategic account planning.

- Participate in Professional Services management team meetings, representing assigned regions and division.

- Perform annual performance reviews.

- Own resource planning and resource assignment for assigned sales regions.

- Track, report and improve team metrics.

- Ensure the global best practices of the Professional Services teams are adhered to: integration best practices as well as operational effectiveness programs.

Customer-Facing

- Provide technical and architectural expertise in positioning and integrating products and services within a customer’s environment.

- Build customer relationships by analyzing technology trends, gathering business requirements, and developing and designing solutions.

- Interact with sales team and the customer during the pre-sales cycle to provide implementation scope and estimates, create proposals and Statements of Work, and conduct trials.

- Coordinate with other members of the Professional Services team to deliver on implementation projects.

- Work closely with Sales, Engineering, Product Development and Customer Care to resolve issues that arise during customer trials or integrations.

- Conduct customer presentations, product demonstrations and proof of concepts to educate customers on Akamai products.

Qualifications:

Education: Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering, Computer Science or related technical field.

- Overall Experience: 7-10 years or equivalent experience in the IT industry.

- 5-7 year(s) of experience or equivalent in a customer facing environment such as Professional Services, Sales Engineering or Technical Account Management.

- 1-3 years team lead experience.

- Project Management experience (PMP or Big 5 experience a plus).

- Working knowledge of the full software development technologies including J2EE/Java, .NET, open source tools and various component models (CORBA, COM, Java Beans).

- Detailed knowledge of Internet technologies, thorough understanding of eCommerce, On-line Marketing, Web Analytics and Security.

- Must possess excellent written, verbal and presentation skills.

- Must be action oriented, capable of independently solving complex technical problems and able to communicate clearly and effectively to both technical and business audiences.

- Must be willing to travel 25-50%.

Desired Qualifications

- Masters Degree in MIS/CS a plus.

- Experience developing and driving Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) strategies within large enterprises.

- Implementation experience with and web delivery services, including a detailed understanding of the impacts of Content Delivery and Distributed Computing within business and technical organizations.

- Experience in one or more web development languages, methodologies, and/or architectures – J2EE, HTPP, DNS, .NET, C#, JSP, ASP, Tomcat, Apache.

For More detailes please write to nasen@akamai.com