Region Practice Lead

Organization Context

The Technology, Avanade X, and Advisory Business Groups (BG) are Avanade’s growth engines responsible for developing market relevant capabilities and solutions to help clients resolve critical business and technology issues. Through practices they provide sales, solutioning and delivery support to Client Groups and Accounts to help us win and sustain long-lasting relationships with our clients. In addition to direct relationships with clients, each Business Group works closely with Avanade’s most significant partners - Microsoft and Accenture, as well as other alliances - to drive growth of the business group and the Practices therein.

While we have made incredible progress in our employee experience in the past few years, we continue to see gaps in clarity around career ladders and pathways and priority skill development opportunities. We also need to be more purposeful in how we build the skills of our talent to meet the market opportunities and integrate these in our sales and solutioning motions. In response, we are evolving our Talent Communities (TC) and better aligning our pre-sales and solutioning efforts into Practices.

All BGs will have Practices. Practices will help us deliver exceptional value to our clients with repeatable go-to-market services, industry expertise, and market[1]leading capability, and help Avanade grow through winning bigger and more complex engagements that require specialist skills across pre-sales through to solutioning and delivery.

Practices are where Avanade’s employees are ‘homed’. Practices are responsible for building and evolving capabilities in line with market and client needs; attracting, developing, and retaining talent; managing deployment of practitioners, and creating/evolving assets and solutions to reduce the cost of sales, delivery, and operations. Practices also provide sales, solutioning and delivery support to help us win and deliver projects and services to clients.

Employees from Practices are deployed to client accounts, Integrated Go-to-Market Lines of Business and Plays, and a new Integrated Center of Excellence to support sales, solutioning, and delivery efforts in regions.

Role Overview

The Region Practice Lead - Azure Platform is a pivotal role that blends market, sales and solutioning, people, and delivery excellence. This role owns the strategy that ensures the region Practice has the right capabilities to seize market advantage and is responsible for driving business growth, supporting sales development and conversion, solutioning and delivery, and practice strategy, in addition to people, capability, and community development.

This role is accountable for ensuring the practice provides sales, solutioning, and delivery support to client accounts and Integrated Go-to-Market Lines of Business and Plays. This role is accountable for ensuring the regional practice has the right capabilities, skillsets, and certifications required to deliver client work both today and tomorrow. It is accountable to create a community with common objectives, build culture, and ensures the employee value proposition is brought to life regionally.

In addition to relationships with clients and the practice community, this role collaborates with business leaders in the region from other practices, Solution Areas (SA), Business Groups (BG), Integrated Go-to-Market (IGTM), Sales, Client Service Leads, Delivery & Solutioning, and internal partners from Human Resources, Workforce Planning, Talent Acquisition, Skills, Learning and Development, etc. to be successful.

This role reports to the relevant Region SA Lead and has dotted line reporting relationship to the relevant Global Practice Lead.

The Region Practice Lead manages regional practice employees and is a member of the Region BG Leadership Team. As a leader this role is equally expected to demonstrate and model Avanade’s values, principles, habits, and behaviours.

Key Accountability

Practice Leadership and Growth
- Define, align (with global/area BG plans, IGTM, and other BGs), implement, and evolve region practice strategy to ensure the region has market leading capabilities. Region strategy and planning drives area and global strategy and planning.
- Manage region (and country where applicable) practice team in line with agreed plans and KPIs
- Incorporate global/area practice priorities into regional practice priorities, cascade to region practice team members and provide feedback loop upwards to global
- Manage and assess performance of regional practice members
- Build strong relationships with regional Avanade, Microsoft, Accenture Technology, and other relevant Accenture leaders to drive growth of the practice and ensure maximum synergy (e.g., working together rather than competing, not duplicating Microsoft skills development, and positioning Avanade as preferred for Microsoft resources)

Sales, Solutioning, and Delivery
- Pro-actively work with Sales, Client Accoun