Director of Federal Programs

Director of Federal Programs

Vacancy expired!

Savant Financial Technologies, Inc. d/b/a Ariel Partners (“Ariel”) is looking for a Director of Federal Programs to join our DC Metro-area Federal practice. Ariel is a fast-growing software consulting and staffing firm with experience executing some of the largest and most difficult technology projects for our government and commercial clients. We have a growing portfolio of Federal contracts and vehicles both as a prime and as a sub, and we also have significant commercial and municipal agency business in NYC. We have specialized expertise in Agile transformation, AWS Cloud, DevOps, responsive web and mobile application development, and performance tuning. We build long-term relationships with our clients and focus on exceptional, high-touch service.
The Director of Federal Programs acts as the main customer point of contact throughout the lifecycle of each Federal account to manage and grow the account and ensure customer satisfaction. They provide program management for all our accounts including budgeting and staff management responsibilities. This role is extremely hands-on, working daily with spreadsheets and with direct reports and customer stakeholders. The successful candidate will combine deep financial analysis skills with significant managerial expertise and customer-facing communication skills.

Job Description
Customers

• Conduct weekly/bi-weekly on-site visits with each assigned account. Expect to spend the entire day at our Stafford, VA and other DMV (District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia) customer locations on at least a semi-monthly basis. Develop a visit and communication plan with senior management to cover in-person and phone communications with each of our customers (covering both management and staff meetings, calibrated by size of account and distance).
• Develop and manage customer relationships to retain existing revenue inclusive of primary contract renewal responsibility within assigned strategic account base, focusing on retention and decreased turnover.
• Regularly conduct site visits with our key customers and meet with Ariel team members both individually and collectively to discuss concerns and address issues.
• Manage resolution of customer-impacting billing and service related issues by facilitating with appropriate internal groups, coordinating completion, and ensuring timely communication.
• Conduct periodic calls/ meetings with assigned customers to foster a strong partnership and ensure that the customers’ issues are regularly voiced, and they are kept informed about ongoing improvement opportunities. Perform regularly scheduled and ad-hoc on-site visits with customers and staff.

Staff

• Manage all staff working at assigned accounts. This includes all regular management functions including managing, tracking, and approving vacation requests, sick leave, training, unpaid time off, and absences. Ensure the target number of billable hours is met by each resource each year within the period of performance.
• Ensure staff complete all required training and briefings and collect certificates with correct naming conventions.
• Conduct regular in-person meetings with all staff members individually and collectively.
• Conduct annual and quarterly performance reviews and update job descriptions at least annually to ensure there is alignment between what the workers are actually doing and what the customer expects them to be doing.
• Review and approve timesheets for all workers on contracts. Confirm hours against actual hours worked. Check timesheet hours against invoicing totals, both for Ariel invoices to our prime or end-customer and for sub-contractors to Ariel.

Recruiting

• Work with Project Managers, team leads and other project stakeholders to identify upcoming recruiting opportunities or expanding business, such as additional task orders.
• Communicate with the Recruiting team to ensure there is an active pipeline of talent to fill openings as they arise.
• Work with the recruiting lead who will be responsible for formatting and submitting resumes and collecting feedback. Proactively—review job descriptions in person with hiring managers at the accounts to ensure that current needs are aligned with job descriptions, to highlight true “must haves” versus the wish list, to identify realistic pay rates and seniority level, and to understand parameters around cultural fit (which often trumps all other concerns). Reactively Help secure feedback after submissions and interviews.
• Manage the recruiting team since the majority of their work will relate to your accounts.

Corporate planning and strategy

• Evaluate and report on performance against contracted SLAs by performing quarterly internal reviews of consultants and clients. Evaluate the need for any appropriate Service Improvement Plans (SIP) and ensure they are implemented to address the issues.
• Perform comprehensive monthly/quarterly business reviews for assigned customers focused on revenue trends, technical network performance, open orders, corresponding improvement plans, billing issues, industry trends and company events.
• Participate in annual and periodic strategic planning; create annual financial projections for each account based on previous year’s budget spreadsheets and plans going forward, to facilitate monthly tracking against forecasts

Account financials and operations

• Update financial spreadsheets on a monthly basis tracking burn rate and budgets against projections for each account. Reconcile the hours and rates against invoices and timesheets.
• Work with operations as needed to address issues such as nearing the end of a task order period of performance, nearing invoicing NTE thresholds, or other concerns.
• Double-check monthly accounts produced by bookkeeping and scan them for errors such as missed rate increases.
• Track hours worked against targets and flag anomalies for handling (such as significant time off or significant overtime over a given time period).

Job Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as a Director of Federal Programs.
• Experience in managing stakeholders, customers, and employees.
• Budgeting experience: spreadsheets, projections, burndown charts, top-line and bottom-line analysis.
• Proven ability to manage and track financials using excel spreadsheets and tools like Deltek.
• Proficiency with Excel and PowerPoint is required.
• Experience or knowledge of how to maintaining company quality certifications including ISO and CMMI standards
• The ability to travel to customer sites on a weekly basis, round-robin. Each customer site should be visited a minimum of once every month or once every two weeks depending on the size and number of consultants.
• Excellent interpersonal skills required to build long-term business relationships with key decision makers within organizations.
• Proven ability to work closely with the customer and effectively negotiate directly with the customer and negotiate internally on their behalf.
• Prior experience with managing staff, which includes conducting performance reviews, bonus & salary recommendations, disciplinary action, hiring and terminations.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate with others across different disciplines, functions and organizations to achieve an expedient resolution of customer issues.
• Capability to propose solutions and process flows.
• Strong multitasking ability to work with cross-functional teams and thrive in a fast-growing, rapidly-changing environment.
• Expert written and oral communication skills including presentation skills, interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, and a professional business image.

In compliance with federal law, all persons hired will be required to verify identity and eligibility to work in the United States and to complete the required employment eligibility verification document form upon hire/offers.

If you are interested in getting more information about this opportunity, please contact Irina Rozenberg Recruiting@arielpartners.com at your earliest convenience.

At Ariel Partners, we solve the most difficult problems that inhibit technology from enabling our customers to achieve their goals. Our vision is to be recognized by our stakeholders as an elite provider of IT solutions, so when they have their biggest challenges we re on their short list. We re looking for team members who share our values of:

Integrity to do the right thing even when it hurts;

Commitment to the long term success and happiness of our customers, our people, and our partners;

Courage to take on difficult challenges, accept new ideas, and accept incremental failure; and the constant pursuit of

Excellence. Ariel Partners is an Equal Opportunity Employer in accordance with federal, state, and local laws