Overview of Group/Department Role Sits in within MS
Microsoft is on a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Our culture is centered on embracing a growth mindset, a theme of inspiring excellence, and encouraging teams and leaders to bring their best each day. In doing so, we create life-changing innovations that impact billions of lives around the world. You can help us to achieve our mission.
Key to consistent, high quality customer support service is building and maintaining world-class operations, and accurate capacity plans to anticipate future customer needs by ensuring they get the best technical support Microsoft can provide, each and every time. To enable this vision, we need forward looking, accurate and insightful capacity planning for our Enterprise Support organization, made of more than 7,000 highly skilled engineers across the globe, and that is growing at fast pace.
The CE&S Planning Team, is a vital component of Shared Business Operations (SBO), whose charter is to modernize Services to compete effectively, enabling agility and trusted experiences that continuously meet the needs of our customers, partners and colleagues. Our priorities are to deliver valuable services and insights, identify and solve for simplification opportunities and plan and deliver new operational motions to accelerate our digital transformation.
Role Purpose
The CE&S Planning Team is expanding his footprint to better support the Microsoft Customer Success organization achieve their goals, through innovative demand and capacity planning models which will help build the right capacity to serve our customers wherever they need us.
We are looking for an experienced Data Scientist / Planner to increase our ability to design, develop and implement innovative predictive models to anticipate future business needs
Responsibilities
Key Responsibilities
- Deliver robust annual/quarterly/monthly demand forecast based on thorough understanding of the growth drivers across markets & technologies, CE&S strategy, and key principles of Services finance KPIs
- Collaborate with diverse set of stakeholders such as Finance, CE&S Leadership, Support Enablement and Offerings design teams in order to incorporate insights into Demand forecast
- Design & implement machine learning forecasting models in order to better predict customer demand, leveraging Sales revenue projections, Business KPIs and market dynamics in each of the 14 geographies (Areas) Microsoft operates
- Provide forward looking business visibility based on advanced statistical analytics, predictive models and deep insights (Scenario modelling, Trend Analysis, Correlations/ Knowledge Discovery, Machine Learning, Statistical Forecasting, Early Warning System etc.).
- Ability to handle large, complex and disparate data sets; build models ground up, interpret the story behind the numbers and syndicate the output with broader set of stakeholders.
- Identify trends and inconsistencies in data to provide perspective and business solutions. Present data-driven analyses to solve complex business problems.
- Provide analytics and insights to the business leaders to have consequential business review rhythms by closely monitoring the Key Performance Indicators, Critical Success Factors, Scorecard Metric, Cost and Productivity levers, Sales Motion, Leading/ Lagging Indicators, Red Pockets, Root Cause Analyses, Recovery Plans, Investments/ ROIs. Enable the business leaders on Governance, Control and Compliance aspects.
Qualifications
Key Success Criteria and Competencies required
- Future orientation balanced with current state through strategic and systems thinking and a global mindset
- Influencing stakeholders to achieve impact through collaboration, presence and strong communication skills
- Judgment – Scopes problems by identifying key issues, inputs, stakeholders, and outcomes. Applies a broad functional knowledge base to solve problems with confidence and persuades others.
- Dealing with Ambiguity
- Change Management
- Analytical problem solving
- Curiosity and willing to innovate, exploring uncharted territories as needed
- Ability to collaborate with multiple peers and stakeholders in a very diverse international environment, spanning several time zones
Experience and Qualification include:
Ideal candidates should have 10+ years of Planning, Analytics and Operations experience and should be self-motivated, confident in working with Senior Leaders and comfortable working in a matrix organization. The candidate needs to be able to achieve results through influence across multiple organizations.
- Bachelor’s in business, information technology, or related field, and/or equivalent experience
- Data science background or finance background w/ technical finance experience
- Forecasting mentality
- Need to know how to run Machine Learning models: R / Python / SAS tools / Azure ML Studio
- Time series forecasting (regression with time series data, exponential smoothing, ARIMA models, others)
- Analytical background, business background and how Revenue & COGS work
- Strong Excel modeling & analytical skills needed
- Knowledge and understanding of the financial and operational functions of a delivery organization budget, time logging, optimizing cost, escalation processes, invoicing, capacity management)
- Ability to develop strong, productive relationships with colleagues and management to meet targeted objectives
- An analytical mind set with the ability define metrics, reports, interpret results, and make recommendations on appropriate courses of action
- Excellent communication, collaboration, organizational, time management, presentation, and writing skills
- Proactive, self-motivated, and team-oriented with strong capabilities to lead and thrive in start-up type organizations