City : Ottawa, ON, Canada

Category : Full time

Industry : Higher Education

Employer : University of Ottawa

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Job Type:

Employee

Duration in Months (for fixed-term jobs):

24

Job Family:

Business Operations

# of Open Positions:

1

Faculty/Service - Department:

Programme Polaris

Campus:

Main Campus

Union Affiliation:

N/A

Date Posted:

November 18, 2024

Applications must be received BEFORE:

December 05, 2024

Hours per week:

35

Salary Grade:

Non-Union Grade NC8 - 35 hrs

Salary Range:

$91,917.00 - $114,078.00

Building on the University of Ottawa’s bold vision of excellence, the University is committed to enabling high-quality administrative services for students, faculty, and staff.

To achieve this, the Office of the Vice-President Finance and Administration has launched a continuous improvement program to better guide, support, and empower our university community by providing effective, user-focused, and contemporary administrative services.

This continuous improvement program is supported by the annual UniForum benchmarking exercise. The Senior Specialist of Business Strategy and Planning will spearhead the UniForum data collection at uOttawa and drive continuous improvement by providing valuable insights to senior leaders across administration and academia. These insights will help enhance administrative efficiency and effectiveness throughout the institution.

While experience with UniForum is a plus, it is not required for this position as the University will provide training. The key attributes for this role are strong analytical, communication, and strategic skills and an ease with Power BI and the Microsoft office suite. By collaborating with various stakeholders, the Senior Specialist will ensure alignment with best practices and contribute to the University’s mission and goals.

Position Purpose
Reporting to Senior Director, Polaris Program, the primary objective of this role is to leverage UniForum data to deliver actionable insights and business intelligence that empower university leaders—both academic and administrative. By fostering strategic reflections and stimulating discussions around administrative performance, this position nurtures a culture of awareness and innovation, uncovering opportunities to improve effectiveness and efficiency across administrative services.

Key responsibilities encompass the development, implementation, and management of comprehensive business and analytical solutions, along with institution-wide reporting on administrative performance. This involves a multifaceted approach that includes researching, analyzing, defining, recommending, developing, configuring, testing, implementing, and supporting solutions aimed at improving administrative delivery. The role also requires effective communication and collaboration with academic and administrative client groups, ensuring that data collection efforts translate into impactful insights for continuous improvement, all while maintaining compliance with regulatory frameworks.

This role will act as the main point of contact for collaborations with Information Technology and the Workday team, to connects technical expertise with operational needs to deliver high-quality reporting. The individual will work closely with senior stakeholders to identify strategic needs and produce and interpret reports that promote informed decision-making and continuous improvement throughout the institution.

In this role, your responsibilities will include:

• Project management: Leads the annual collection of UniForum data. Plans and develops business intelligence projects, including scoping solutions, identifying data sources and business rules, evaluating the technical and operational feasibility of solutions proposed, and developing critical processes for validating systemic compliance with accounting rules. For this purpose, the incumbent works in close collaboration with interdisciplinary teams consisting of business owners and stakeholders. Leads inter-disciplinary project according to the needs of each project. Negotiate with client managers and IT managers in other departments.

• Business analysis: Analyzes business and strategic needs and recommends sound and justified business solutions to monitor periodical data related to operations and performance, solve business problems, increase administrative efficiency, lower administrative costs and improve service.

• Data analysis: Provides quantitative processes/data analysis and prepares documentation explaining data source, trends, comparisons, and business knowledge discoveries with the objective of providing meaningful data which contributes toward strategic decision-making.

• Reporting: Ensures the development and delivery of reporting tools as required by executives and managers to serve operational and strategic management needs. Designs standard reports and generates one-time, ad hoc reports by crafting custom queries. Develops reports available for use by collaborators in faculties and services, and others strictly for centralized use by Financial Resources to meet institution-wide reporting obligations. Validates and ensures data quality that helps users to gain insights and make better fact-based business decisions.

• Promotion and change management: Plays a key role amongst managers to promote the value of Business Intelligence and for embedding cultural changes related to the utilization of relevant Business Intelligence tools that support operational and strategic decision making.

• Continuous improvement: Ensure relevant technologies and best practices are employed which support effective and efficient budgeting, variance analysis, forecasting and reporting processes. Promotes innovation and continuous improvement. Continually seeks optimal financial controls and processes performance. Works with the leadership team to drive broad cultural change and position the organization for long-term success by helping to improve or build high performing processes. Stays abreast of industry trends, new technology, work methods and techniques associated with all aspects of technical improvements within an ERP. Proactively researches technologies and tools that are of potential interest to the University and make recommendations to management.

• Risk Management: Monitors and manages all risks and issues in plans and requirements and works in collaboration with other experts responsible for business contingency plans across the University to take appropriate action to mitigate and resolve them.

What you will bring:

• University degree in Business, Computer Science, Information Technology or a related field or an equivalent combination of education and experience.

• Minimum 5 years’ experience in a complex and diverse environment demonstrating experience in project planning, risk analysis and project management, preferably in a finance environment.

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and an ability to present to committees and senior leaders

• A certification in project management would be an asset.

• Expert knowledge of financial systems, business processes and management systems, and of business intelligence tools (Workday an asset)

• Demonstrated experience in developing financial and operational reports (like HR/ payroll reports) 

• Experience in managing large multiple, cross-functional activities or projects  that span multiple years.

• Demonstrated capacity to provide high level analyses in complex situations and to offer strategic insights for decision making

• Good analytical and research abilities, critical thinking and attention to detail.

• Client oriented and with an ability to lead and manage change

• Bilingualism – French and English (spoken and written).

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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 hrtalentmanagement@uottawa.ca 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.