Technical (Customer) Project Coordination
Delegator |
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|---|---|
Role Keepers |
Open, New Employee |
Contact |
#sol Team Chat |
| This is a new role. We’ll further clarify this role during onboarding. |
Purpose
Why is this role needed, what need of the organization does it address, or how is it relevant within the organization?
Once a Solution Architect has understood the requirements, drafted and quoted a solution with Sales, and this has been ordered, the Account Managers serve as a tactical and strategic interface to our customers and coordinate projects and later escalations that go beyond individual requests (tickets). Projects are often quite extensive and technically complex, especially during onboarding or when a customer needs extensions/changes. We also often have inquiries (tickets) that are technically and commercially complex, and we sometimes have internally driven changes affecting multiple customers or internal process improvements that could benefit from clear ownership.
We therefore see the need for the Account Managers to have a technical (customer) project and service management capacity that can drive projects and changes forward, take over coordination, handle technically complex customer escalations, join customer meetings to better understand requirements, and similar tasks. This will relieve the Solution Architects and Account Managers and make orders (tickets) clearer for the Value Stream Team Engineers.
Key Responsibilities
List the essential responsibilities assigned to this role.
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Coordination of technical customer setup or change projects
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Support through high-level technical understanding and driving clarifications
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Project and process change ownership for service delivery and support processes
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Support technical customer escalations and follow-up on relevant incidents
Stakeholders and Key Deliverables
Whom does this role deliver value to, what do they need from this role?
- VSHN Value Stream Teams
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Ownership and clarification of technically complex customer requests into refined tasks/epics.
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Representation of customer’s needs and feedback during the project or escalations/bigger incident follow-ups.
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- Customer Account Managers
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Support in technically complex matters with their customers.
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Support in incident coordination and follow-ups.
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Technical coordination of inside-out (product)-driven changes affecting their customers.
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- VSHN Customer
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Technical coordination of their onboarding or change projects.
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A working request handling and support process according to SLA and best effort customer service.
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- Project Management and Product Owners
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Inside-out driven initiatives to align existing customers' setups to product strategy.
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Dependencies
- Customer Account Managers
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They own the overall customers, including onboarding or change projects. This role supports with more technical understanding and coordination of the technical tasks to deliver. This is important to avoid becoming the sole go-to person for the customer and a potential single point of failure or bottleneck.
- Value Stream Teams
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They need to help the role keep up with the technical knowledge, give insights into how things work, provide hands-on support, and teach about tech and VSHN products and services.
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They need to help document existing solutions, as they might have the best understanding at the moment, while this role can ensure and coordinate how this needs to be done.
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Triage of (complicated) clear requests needs to work, so that the Account Managers and this role can focus on the technically, strategically, or commercially complex cases.
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Competencies, Qualities, and Skills
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Business mindset, tactical and strategic thinking
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Strong technical background (software/devops), broad is more important than deep understanding
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Customer service-oriented
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Cooperative leadership personality, not a one-man show
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Curiosity to learn and understand technically complex situations, new products, and technology
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Process and workflow thinking, striving to clarify, automate, standardize, and structure things
Assignment of this Role
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We would start this role as an experiment, for example, for 3-4 months and define clear goals/evaluation criteria. The experiment should prove that this need a) exists and b) can be covered by such a role. We might set priorities on what to focus on first, as we don’t see it as realistic that all of this role can be done right from the start.
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We try to hire/contract a person with a strong technical background and the competencies mentioned above.