Senior Strategic Customer Success Advisor - Apptio

Introduction
IBM's Industry Consultants are essential to our clients as they work to reinvent themselves for the future. Join our highly visible and highly skilled team of global consultants as we strive to accelerate sales, deliver client engagements, and build IBM's market eminence. If you are a forward-thinker and a curious intellectual, we welcome you to apply for your next exciting career challenge!

Your Role and Responsibilities
The Senior (Sr) Strategic Customer Success Advisor (Advisor) will be responsible for providing consultative guidance to our most strategic customers to ensure successful adoption and expansion of the Apptio product suite. By developing and maintaining a high level of customer engagement, the Advisor will partner with Account Management (sales), the Customer Success Manager and other Apptians or partners assigned to the account to foster long-term strategic relationships to ensure every customer realizes full value from their investment with Apptio.

• Inquisitive mind and passion for learning about customers, industries, and innovative approaches to doing things which include, but not limited to:
  • Organizational change management and transformation, including methodologies and governance
  • IT, Cloud, Digitization, Product, Agile industry drivers, trends, and technologies
  • Organizational efficiency and operational excellence
  • Driving innovation in the TBM/Cloud/Agile domains
  • Translation of business initiatives and challenges into actionable roadmap and solutions defining use cases leading to measurable value outcomes

• Strong self-starter with the ability to build a network within Apptio as well as with the Executives in your assigned portfolio of customers
• Demonstrated ability to communicate, present, and influence credibly and effectively at all levels of a customer's organization
• Motivate and inspire a multidisciplinary internal Apptio team to solve customer challenges without direct management responsibility
• Creatively solve problems with limited input and resources in a fast-paced, high-pressure environment
• Credible and effective C-level advisor/coach, especially with regards to the TBM, Agile and Cloud disciplines
• Strong teamwork, facilitation, and soft skills such as listening and empathy with the ability to:
  • Balance conversations within groups
  • Offer suggestions and improvements to process and work effectively with all personalities
  • Drive towards building consensus
  • Effectively manage deadlines

• Working knowledge of Technology delivery frameworks and methodologies (i.e., ITIL, Waterfall, Agile etc.)
• Working knowledge of FinOps and public cloud (i.e., AWS, Azure, Google)
• Operational knowledge of Portfolio management (i.e., SAFe, Scrum, and Kanban)
• Consultative approach, including the ability to translate customer needs into a roadmap, aligning use cases to defined value outcomes and client agreed metrics
• Experience with implementing and supporting enterprise solutions (CRM, ERP, CMDB etc.)
• IBM Apptio product knowledge with ability to quickly learn and demonstrate product capabilities in response to customer opportunities and needs

• Drive user adoption across the customer organizations by understanding their specific challenges and helping them to operationalize and realize benefit from their deployed IBM Apptio solution
• Understand and document customer process workflows that apply to TBM/Cloud/Agile domains and implement strategies that integrate IBM Apptio solutions to those processes
• Identify risks to the customer achieving their stated business goals and develop, then execute, appropriate mitigation plans with the entire Apptio internal team assigned to the account
• Mentor customers' ability to become "insight hunters" by helping them realize measurable value by implementing use cases aligned to their corporate objectives and organizational focus
• Co-create a personalized Customer Adoption roadmap that aligns corporate goals, what is possible, key business initiatives, KPI's, and a practical implementation timeline
• Serve as liaison between our customers and various Apptio teams to ensure that needs/requirements critical to customer success are understood and effectively communicated, including gathering customer product feedback to shape product roadmap development
• Strategic Consulting
• Build the relationship and develop the trust of your client's executives to function as their strategic advisor
• Evangelize Technology Business Management (TBM), Agile Portfolio and FinOps practices
• Engage regularly with customers via workshops, operational and business reviews to evaluate needs and strategic direction and align with a clear roadmap. Business reviews with executives should be quarterly and status reports with operational teams should be bi-weekly/monthly
• Use storytelling to highlight customer value augmented with technical expertise by demonstration in the IBM Apptio suite of products
• Find, mentor, and develop process owners into TBM, Agile Portfolio and FinOps Champions
• Align customers to the growing TBM, and FinOps markets and the standards being developed to support consistency and success in rolling out TBM, and FinOps Processes. Standards such as those vetted and published by the TBM Council (http://tbmcouncil.org) and the FinOps Foundation (https://learn.finops.org/)
• Provide timely account or executive summary status reports both to customers and Apptio Executives
• Develop and maintain long-term relationships with stakeholders in the account portfolio, where appropriate, by networking between customers, partners, and Apptio

• Develop internal and external facing collateral (content) to:
  • Support customer adoption efforts
  • Lead Customer User Groups
  • Present at TBM /FinOps Conferences
  • Contribute the community with blogs, whitepapers, etc.
  • Teach the FinOps and/or TBM Exec cert courses
  • Expand the knowledgebase & best practices leveraged by Apptio Teams
• Contribute internally to the Customer Success organization by sharing technical / domain knowledge and advancing best practices and advisory skills, including but not limited to:
  • Lead and contribute to internal projects and initiatives
  • Serve as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for specific domain or process area
  • Contribute thought leadership and best practice on how to "Run IT Like a Business"

• Education in a Technology, Finance, engineering, or business-related discipline
• 10+ years Program Management, Portfolio Oversight, or Consulting experience that was customer Executive facing
• Experience with cloud-based/SaaS solution offerings

• 15+ years in Big-4 consulting, or within the IT Finance, Cloud and/or Technology industry as CIOs/SVPs/Directors
• Consultative style and ability to communicate technical concepts to people of all backgrounds and skill levels, especially at the C-Suite level
• Experience in the IBM Apptio Suite of products (Cloudability, Turbonomics, Costing and Planning, TargetProcess)
• Ability to turn data into action to make strategic recommendations
• Proven ability to build and maintain strong relationships with a diverse set of internal and external constituencies including C-Level Leaders and Senior Level executives
• Excellent organization, program/project management, time management, and communication skills
• Ability to lead cross functional business and technical teams to provide timely issue resolution
• Strong understanding of business processes and their integration into enterprise applications
• Willingness to 'roll up one's sleeves' and assist wherever needed
• Team player who will innovate to continue improving the way Apptio serves its customers
• Ability to travel up to 25% of the time
• Must have working knowledge in several of the following areas:
  • IT Financial Management
  • Cloud Management
  • IT Service and Portfolio Management
  • Asset Management
  • Vendor and Contract Management
  • Technology Project and Portfolio Management
  • IT Infrastructure Management
  • Strategy and Planning
  • Application Portfolio Management
  • Agile Methodology