The Business Architect, Business Performance Manager, Business Strategy Manager, Business Planner Job Description

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I’ve written several job descriptions for Business Architect, Business Performance Manager, Business Strategy Manager, Business Planner, etc for the groups I’ve worked in and noticed that I tend to write the same things over and over again so I built a template to help me in the future. I've shared this with a few folks interested in it and thought others might also find it useful so I thought I'd post it on my blog. See below.

Btw, I want to note that I don't assume there is a requirement for such roles in organizations. In fact, I think the perfect situation is where these roles don't exist at all and instead they simply become a discipline adopted by roles such as Organization Leader, Business Managers and Portfolio Planners. This helps simplify the link between strategy management skills and the roles accountable in an organization to formulate strategy and manage execution to it. For the moment, however, many organizations need such roles as described below to establish strategy management and execution and mature their organizations to the point it is self-sustaining without them.

One more interesting observation I want to share is that my base template below seems to be a starting point for roles such as Business Architect, Business Performance Manager, Business Strategy Manager, Business Planner, even Enterprise Architect to some groups I've worked with. This indicates to me that these roles are similar, perhaps merging, into a common skill set. Hmmmm.

Job Description Base Template

The <Business Architect/Business Strategy Manager/Business Planner> is responsible for:

  • Facilitating Strategy Formulation processes involving market analysis, government regulation, and internal assessment resulting in actionable change plans managed through Portfolio Management processes.
  • Facilitating Business Model blueprints optimizing the organization's products/services portfolio in context of the strategy of the organization
  • Facilitating Portfolio Management processes across the organization to prioritize resources to deliver the greatest contribution to business strategic objectives, the fastest, and at the lowest cost
  • Building strong, working relationships with senior leaders in organizations to ensure organizational alignment and coordination to enable value stream execution
  • Continuously manage process quality and data quality with compliance to internal standards and policies
  • Building strong, working relationships with People Managers and Budget Planners to align business performance management methods directly to people commitments as well financial allocation classifications
  • Championing the purpose and business value realized from the strategy and planning function to stakeholders to gain buy-in and maintain longevity of the function
  • Contributing to future state architectures by providing documented business strategies mapped to process models and strategic initiatives

 The successful candidate will have:

  • Bachelor’s degree
  • 5+ years demonstrated success institutionalizing strategy management processes for large organizations with working knowledge of industry methods such as the Balanced Scorecard, Blue Ocean, SWOT, PESTEL, and the Balanced Scorecard.
  • 4+ years demonstrated success institutionalizing business modeling and business process modeling disciplines with a working knowledge of industry methods such as Alex Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas or Environment-Strategy-Structure-Operations
  • 4+ years demonstrated success institutionalizing cross-organization Program Portfolio Managements functions for large organizations
  • 3+ years demonstrated success implementing Business Process Modeling methods to capture and manage an organization's business processes with a focus on achieving the business' strategy through customer-oriented value chains
  • 3+ years demonstrated success implementing change management processes with knowledge of industry best practices such as Kotter’s 8-Step Process for leading change or ADKAR’s change management model
  • Experience, training or certification in Enterprise Architecture frameworks and methods such as TOGAF, Zachman Framework, Gartner, et al
  • Experience and knowledge for basic financial accounting methods used in budget and planning processes
  • Excellent cross-group collaboration and communication skills and demonstrated virtual team leadership skills

 Preferred Qualifications:

  • Masters of Business Administration
  • Balanced Scorecard Professional
  • Strategy Management Professional
  • Portfolio Management Professional experience, training or certifications
  • Enterprise Architecture experience, training or certifications
  • Financial accounting experience, training or certification