Description

We are a long established and highly respected Microsoft Gold Partner with an extensive portfolio of high-profile clients that is continuing to grow.

Due to our continued growth, we are looking for a Senior Consultant who is experienced in ensuring successful definition and delivery of Microsoft-based solutions ensuring time, cost and quality expectations are successfully achieved.

The focus of the role is to lead client engagements by providing technical thought leadership ensuring that the business challenges of the client are understood, and that the technology is applied appropriately to overcome the challenges.

It is our mission to continue growing our portfolio, providing support and guidance to ensure clients are delighted with our service.  We deliver enterprise solutions, but also keep a keen eye on the future strategic needs of our clients to ensure our solutions our future proofed. Further to this CPS and Microsoft are driving sustainment within businesses we work with; therefore, adoption and change management is another key aspect of our delivery.

Role Requirements

The ideal candidate will be:

• An experienced technical expert with excellent consultative skills able to communicate with all levels and areas of an organisation.
• A self-starter, keen to further develop both their personal and the company’s knowledge and skillset, with a ‘make it happen’ attitude.
• Able to demonstrate a proven commercial awareness enabling them to grow the relationship with a client and identify new opportunities whilst they are working on client engagements.
• Able to manage their own time within the commercial aspects of engagements to ensure that all activities are delivered to high quality, on time and within budget.
• Able to demonstrate a proven ability to deliver projects based on a range of Microsoft based technologies to a broad client base, ensuring that the solutions take into consideration technical strategy, successful adoption, long-term sustainability and commercial awareness.
• Able to ensure that clients are delighted by their experience when engaging with CPS.
• Able to design solutions to the highest level and that meet the expectations of clients in every respect.
• Able to demonstrate a broad knowledge of solution delivery patterns and practices, application lifecycle management approaches, with experience gained through all phases from design, development, test and release cycle to delivery and maintenance.

CPS have clients across the UK and travel is required at times, with occasional overseas assignments.  This is balanced by an ability to work from home for some of the time.

Key Responsibilities

The candidate will be responsible for:

• Support the sales team by providing:
  • Demonstrations the capabilities of technical solutions to prospective clients as part of the pre-sales process
  • Support on pre-sales discovery calls and meetings
  • High level estimations of the effort required to deliver solutions in the form of activity lists used as the basis for Statements of Work
• Technical expertise when responding to tenders and other requests for information
• Ability to translate business requirements into technical requirements and technical implementation into business benefit
• Experience in Microsoft programs such as Catalyst
• Undertaking the following requirements gathering activities
• Facilitation of requirements gathering workshops with C-level stakeholders downwards
• Management of the expectations of clients involved in workshops
• Documenting the findings of workshops in the form of current state assessments, vision, and strategy recommendations
• Build high- and low- level solution design documentation that can be handed over to a delivery team to implement
• Support the growth of knowledge and skills within CPS by:
  • Evangelising the latest technologies
  • Building demonstrations of the latest technology
  • Sharing the knowledge internally within CPS
• Delivering a professional, customer focused and high performing solution design service
• Ensuring that all content provided to customers is on the highest quality and has been through the internal quality assurance checks before being published
• Contributing to the internal processes and standards to ensure that the outcome of engagements is always improving
• Passing exams required for CPS to achieve recognition from Microsoft
• Promoting CPS as an expert source of knowledge regarding the latest technologies through blogs, user groups, conferences, etc

Essential Technical Skills

• Expert understanding of the Power Platform
  • Power Apps
    • Canvas Apps,
    • Model Driven Apps,
    • Custom Pages
    • Portals
  • Power Pages
  • Dataverse
    • Data Model Creation
    • Virtual Tables
    • Azure Integration
  • Power Automate
    • Cloud Flows
    • Desktop Flows
    • Process Advisor
    • Business Process Flows
  • Power Virtual Agents
  • Data Flows
  • Power BI
    • DAX
    • Data Transformation
    • ETL Processing
    • Power Query
  • Power Platform Professional Development Customisations
    • JavaScript
    • Custom Connectors
    • Platform Integration
    • Custom Workflow Assemblies
  • Expert functional understanding of Dynamics 365 Modules:
    • Sales
    • Marketing
    • Service
    • Business Central
    • Customer Service
    • Project Operations

Desirable Skills

• Demonstrate an understanding in the Microsoft workloads, including
• Microsoft 365
  • Microsoft Teams
  • SharePoint Online
  • Planner
  • Security
  • Compliance
• Azure
  • Azure Active Directory
  • Azure DevOps
  • Azure Functions
  • Logic Apps
• Identity and access management
  • Demonstrate an expertise of the components used to implement identity access management
  • Demonstrate an expertise of device and application management
  • Demonstrate an expertise of the security considerations of the Microsoft cloud
  • Demonstrate an expertise of infrastructure and networking considerations for working with the Microsoft cloud
• Data and BI
  • Demonstrate an expertise in the capabilities of the Microsoft data platform and reporting capabilities
  • Demonstrable understanding of cognitive services and AI
• Development
  • Proven experience in building different types of solutions
  • Demonstrable understanding of Office PnP
  • Demonstrable understanding and implementation of PCF components
  • Proven experience in deploying solutions

• Integration
  • Proven experience of integrating Microsoft solutions with other systems and line of business solutions
  • Application Lifecycle Management
  • Experience in designing and developing complex software applications and planning, deploying and supporting large scale implementations
  • Experience of estimating effort required to deliver solutions
  • Demonstrated experience in testing procedure and QA and QC protocols
  • Understanding of enterprise application architecture
  • Experience in technical architectural topology

Personal Traits

• Confidence in own abilities
• Expert knowledge within this subject area
• Fast assimilator of information
• Imaginative problem solver
• Structured organiser, with an eye for detail
• Appreciation of a quality approach
• Strong relationship building skills
• Strong analytical and numeracy skills
• Ability to use initiative and work under pressure, prioritising to meet deadlines
• Drive, leading on initiatives, being committed to the role and delivering on objectives and deadlines
• Effective communication (written and verbal) and negotiation skills with a wide variety of stakeholders
• Service orientation, demonstrable commitment to customer service
• Be Passionate about technology!

Candidates will be able to demonstrate the breadth and depth of their suitability for this role with the following proof points:

• Demonstrable a background in solution definition and delivery for services being delivered to external customers
• Experience of managing customers when there are issues, acting with credibility and professionalism as well as giving confidence to customers on progression of the delivery
• The ability and drive to strive for effective changes and continuous improvement in all aspects of client engagement
• Experience of working with in-house development teams or offshore developers would be ideal
• Expert knowledge of Office 365 and Azure
• Expert knowledge of current and previous Microsoft SharePoint platforms
• Expertise with user experience design
• Experience of change management and adoption
• Experience with Agile or Scrum methodology

Benefits

Some of the benefits which are integrated as part of being a colleague at CPS includes:

• 9 Day Fortnight – three day weekend every other week
• Vitality – Private Medical Insurance
• YuLife – Income Protection and employee discounts benefits
• Health Assured – Employee Wellbeing Support
• Medicash – Health Cash Plan
• 25 days holiday – increasing to 26 days after 1 year, to 27 days after 2 years and to 28 days after 5 years
• Have your birthday as an additional day off from work. Can be adjusted to be taken within a week of your birthday if that is your preference
• Quarterly and annual star performer awards and rewarded with prizes – voted for by your peers and colleagues
• Annual professional training budget to support your Personal Development Plan
• Award winning culture http://www.greatplacetowork.co.uk/best-workplaces/best-workplaces-in-the-uk
• Fortnightly ‘Engagement’ survey to assess staff Happiness levels
• Quarterly company meetings with associated social/team building events
• Workplace pension scheme which goes beyond the standard schemes
• No arduous annual appraisal process – your line manager will hold a 1-2-1 with you quarterly, as a minimum, to review and realign your objectives and your PDP as appropriate
• Free on-site parking, subject to availability
• Long service recognition at 5, 10, 15, 20 years and onwards
• Unlimited hot and cold refreshments throughout the day in the Marlow office
• Complimentary fruit & snacks
• Monthly Fat/Fit Fridays! (pre-pandemic)
• Free chair massages - head, arms, shoulders and back (pre-pandemic)
• Regular social activities such as a summer event (Pub in the Park http://pubintheparkuk.com/ ), Christmas event, Dragon boat racing http://tag-events.com/portfolio/marlow-dragon-boat-festival/, quiz nights, wine tasting, pub nights, family events, BBQs and so much more