Senior Manager, Technology VMO Strategic Operations

At Disney, we’re storytellers. We make the impossible, possible. The Walt Disney Company is a world-class entertainment and technological leader. Walt’s passion was to continuously envision new ways to move audiences around the world—a passion that remains our touchstone in an enterprise that stretches from theme parks, resorts and a cruise line to sports, news, movies and a variety of other businesses. Uniting each endeavor is a commitment to creating and delivering unforgettable experiences — and we’re constantly looking for new ways to enhance these exciting experiences.

The Enterprise Technology mission is to deliver technology solutions that align to business strategies while enabling enterprise efficiency and promoting cross-company collaborative innovation. Our group drives competitive advantage by enhancing our consumer experiences, enabling business growth, and advancing operational excellence.

The Technology Process and Performance organization partners across all organizations to drive process efficiencies and effectiveness by measuring the organization's performance and driving excellence. As part of the TP&P team, the Vendor Management Office (VMO) is dedicated to enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of vendor-related processes across our organization. As part of this mission, the VMO aims to leverage data-driven insights to optimize vendor management, streamline operations, and support informed decision-making. The Data Product Analyst will play a critical role in this vision by supporting the development and maintenance of data products, ensuring accurate and timely data integration, and helping to deliver valuable insights to key stakeholders.

The Senior Manager, Strategic Operations is responsible for thought partnership, strategy development and execution, and key program ownership of complex large-scale VMO strategies and programs across a diverse portfolio of technology domains with a focus on vendor optimization supporting all aspects of Enterprise Technology and in partnership with Segments including:

• Align strategic vendor agreements (modernize rate cards, services, reporting needs, etc.)

• Drive outsourcing optimization and managing the change across Enterprise Technology

• Identifying and activating efforts to eliminate small vendors, shift to MOSA partners, and offshoring.

• Stakeholder management and strategic vendor relationship management

Key Areas of Responsibilities

• Collaborates across teams and stakeholders to create the holistic vendor sourcing and resource optimization strategy that defines business objectives / outcomes, success measurements, and aligns with the Enterprise Technology/Corporate objectives.

• Participate in and drive effective strategy and program execution, ensure planning, value assessment, negotiation tactics, quality assessment, and technical fit with complete transparency and communication of direction, change, risks, and issues with the goal of removing blockers for teams to be successful. Escalates promptly to drive deliverables.

• Collaborates with technology teams, sourcing, finance and leadership to analyze and manage strategies, efficiencies, and impacts.

• Provide leadership and guidance, evaluating vendor strategies and measurement. Collaborates with teams to assess risks and create mitigation plans.

• Identifies and executes deliverables by working with teams to drive defined outcomes, assess impact and communicate with leadership, and appropriate stakeholders.

• Collaborates with and enables functional teams through high-priority, complex vendor management, which often require high levels of organizational savvy, negotiation skills, financial acumen, and deep technical knowledge. 

• Work with VMO Leadership to develop and execute VMO strategies, plans and deliverables with cross discipline teams.

• Collaborate alignment on processes and/or tools.

Required Skills

• 10+ years of relevant work experience in technology, including experience in vendor negotiations and management.

• Have extensive previous and proven technology expertise, vendor and sourcing knowledge, and proven leadership experience, to align and motivate teams to develop and produce quality outcomes driving business value.

• Deep understanding of vendor management, sourcing and legal domain components, including ecosystems of tools/vendors, architecture, technology landscape, and deployment practices.

• Experience in managing large and complex strategic vendors contracts. Brings deep understanding of different types of vendor operating models.

• Highly effective at collaboration and interaction with technology teams, corporate business units, segments, finance, and sourcing, including senior leadership.

• Successfully operate in a highly matrix organizational system where partnership and influence are key drivers of success.

• Experience operating within large scale complex transformation programs.

• Demonstrate ability to successfully drive change and transformation in our engagement with key strategic vendors to improve customer experience while driving optimization and efficiencies.

• Demonstrates an ability to employ critical thinking to manage issues to optimize delivery.

• Proven experience as a functional leader who provides guidance and recommendations with at least 5-8 years of experience in leading large, multidisciplinary efforts across a large-scale matrix organization.

• Proven facilitator that can lead meetings and workshops driving commitments, accountability, and deliverables. 

• Demonstrated exceptional critical thinking, strategic planning, and process management skills. 

• Demonstrated strong financial, analytic, and problem-solving skills to achieve business results.

• Strong interpersonal, organizational, and communication skills and the ability to work effectively across a wide range of constituencies.

• Ability to communicate effectively to executive leadership in both business and technology roles. 

• Excellent organizational, communication and time management skills.

Preferred Skills

• Experience with leading or managing complex vendor services transition.

• Experience with complex contract billing structures (Fixed vs. Variables and Resource Units measurement), and deep expertise in process and tools leveraged for vendor reporting and invoicing.

Education

• BA/BS in technology management, business, computer science, other tech field or equivalent work experience.

• Preferred, MBA or equivalent advance degree and/or experience

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