Lead, Enterprise Operations

About the Role

The Lead, Enterprise Operations is a senior leadership position at Safaricom responsible for orchestrating the entire service delivery lifecycle for enterprise and public sector clients. This role bridges the gap between post-sale handovers and ongoing service excellence, ensuring that complex solutions—including connectivity, cloud, cybersecurity, and IoT—are provisioned accurately, billed correctly, and supported according to strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs). The Lead oversees critical functions such as order-to-cash orchestration, operational risk management, business continuity planning, and strategic retention strategies to maximize customer loyalty and revenue realization.

Key Responsibilities

Order-to-Cash Orchestration

• Lead end-to-end order management from post-sale handover through provisioning, activation, billing readiness, and service handover.
• Establish structured order governance frameworks to ensure completeness and accuracy of contract-to-delivery transitions.
• Monitor activation turnaround times and eliminate bottlenecks across provisioning workflows.
• Track order fallout, rejection rates, and rework drivers to improve first-time-right activation.

Service Activation & Delivery Governance

• Coordinate cross-functional delivery of complex ICT, cloud, cybersecurity, IoT, and managed service solutions.
• Oversee implementation timelines for enterprise and public sector contracts.
• Ensure deployment readiness through structured project and delivery alignment forums.
• Validate solution scope adherence before go-live and monitor performance against contracted milestones.

SLA Management & Service Reliability

• Own SLA governance across the enterprise portfolio, ensuring uptime, availability, and performance compliance.
• Track service reliability metrics and drive structured performance reviews with technology teams.
• Identify recurring failure patterns and lead root cause elimination initiatives.
• Protect enterprise revenue by minimizing SLA penalties and service credits.

Escalation & Incident Governance

• Establish tiered escalation frameworks for high-severity enterprise incidents.
• Lead crisis response coordination across technical and support teams, ensuring transparent communication with clients during outages.
• Oversee post-incident reviews and maintain incident trend dashboards to reduce Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR).

Risk Control & Business Continuity

• Define and implement the Enterprise Operational Risk Framework, ensuring robust RCSA, KRIs/KCIs, and control testing.
• Own the Enterprise Business Continuity Framework, conducting Business Impact Analyses (BIA) and managing robust Business Continuity Plans (BCP).
• Drive end-to-end resilience testing, including disaster recovery drills and simulation exercises.

Retention Care & Customer Experience

• Own the end-to-end retention strategy for enterprise clients to minimize churn.
• Establish proactive risk management mechanisms using usage trends and sentiment analytics to identify at-risk accounts.
• Coordinate cross-functional retention squads to resolve systemic pain points or commercial blockers.

Process Simplification & Automation

• Define the Enterprise Automation roadmap and lead programs across provisioning, ticketing, and service assurance.
• Embed digital tools for order tracking, customer visibility, and operational reporting.
• Improve cost-to-serve metrics through workflow redesign and adoption of self-service portals.

Commercial Operations & Bid Management

• Deliver enterprise business excellence across all sectors, strengthening pricing governance and margin discipline.
• Lead end-to-end bid governance, ensuring all enterprise bids are commercially viable, compliant, and aligned to organizational strategy.
• Oversee the development of bid responses and monitor win/loss trends to improve commercial effectiveness.

Leadership & Talent Development

• Coach and mentor the leadership team to drive strategic excellence and disruptive thinking.
• Institutionalize a functional Academy to develop playbooks and digital-first innovation models.
• Champion the adoption of emerging technologies (AI, IoT, cloud, blockchain) to enable digital transformation.

Qualifications and Experience

• Academic Background: Bachelor’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering, Electrical Engineering, ICT, Computer Science, Business Administration, or a related field. A Master’s degree (MBA, MSc, or MA) in Business, Operations, or Strategic Management is required.
• Professional Experience: Minimum of 10–12 years of progressive experience in enterprise service delivery, telecom operations, ICT operations, or managed services within a regulated technology environment.
• Certifications: Certification in IT Service Management frameworks (ITIL v3 or v4) is required. Project management certification (PMP, PRINCE2, or equivalent) is required or strongly preferred.
• Technical Proficiency: Strong understanding of enterprise ICT environments, telecom network architecture, and service assurance systems.
• Operational Skills: Demonstrated experience in operational process design, automation initiatives, and managing high-severity customer escalations.
• Governance & Risk: Experience embedding operational risk controls and compliance frameworks within large-scale customer operations.