Senior Manager, HR Applications and Support

University of Ottawa • Ottawa, ON

10d • CA$118,675 - CA$148,344 • Onsite

About The Position

Reporting to the Director of HR and Finance Applications and Support, this role leads the strategy, delivery, and continuous improvement of the University’s HR applications. The goal is to ensure systems are reliable, scalable, and aligned with institutional priorities and business needs. This position provides overall direction for application management, enhancement roadmaps, and service delivery, with a strong focus on optimizing performance, enhancing the user experience, and maximizing value. The role leads a multidisciplinary team of experts responsible for system configuration, reporting, support, and innovation. It fosters a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement, enabling high-quality service delivery and ensuring responsiveness to evolving operational demands. The Senior Manager partners with business leaders and stakeholders to translate strategic objectives and operational requirements into effective, sustainable technology solutions that improve efficiency and support informed decision-making. This role drives the prioritization and execution of initiatives in a dynamic environment with competing demands, balancing immediate operational needs with long-term strategic goals. It ensures strong governance, effective change management, and the successful delivery of system enhancements and reporting capabilities. The Senior Manager monitors system performance, service levels, and user satisfaction to identify opportunities for optimization, innovation, and ongoing improvement.

Requirements

• University degree in Computer Science, Management Information Systems (MIS), Business Administration, Commerce, or a related discipline or an equivalent combination of education and work experience.
• Five (5) years of experience in leadership roles supporting large scale systems implementation and maintenance with a proven track record in Business Analysis, System Analysis, Process Analysis, and customer support.
• Advanced business knowledge of Human Resources processes and operations.
• Demonstrated experience and advanced knowledge of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and/or similar HR solutions and its related processes and principles (Workday is a strong asset).
• Strong understanding and experience of the end-to-end ERP implementation and product life cycle.
• Analytical, critical and business oriented thinking to conceptualize organizational changes, business processes and agreements.
• Experience designing, implementing, and supporting integrated business processes.
• Experience working in a diverse work environment, with a broad understanding of multiple business sectors.
• Proven abilities in building partnerships and/or collaborative working relationships with a wide variety of internal and external stakeholders.
• Excellent ability to coordinate a variety of tasks under pressure, managing priorities, meeting strict deadlines and following up on deliverables.
• Knowledge of change-management principles.
• Demonstrated initiative, autonomy and excellent leadership skills to foster commitment and cooperation within a team.
• Knowledge of data and information management practices, and IT security with an ability to communicate technical concepts in a non-technical manner (ability to vulgarize).
• Ability to proactively keep abreast of new and emerging trends and technologies in ERP for HR.
• Bilingualism – French and English (written and spoken).

Nice To Haves

• Workday is a strong asset.

Responsibilities

• Manages a team of business analysts and technical experts, providing administrative and technical direction to ensure applications’ development, configuration, maintenance, improvement, and user support meet the highest standards.
• Recruits staff, drives performance, identifies development needs, mentors, and recommends appropriate training strategies. Promotes a positive work environment, adaptability, and a culture of continuous improvement, and resolves conflicts as needed.
• Plans and monitors operational pipelines and projects by leading, supervising, negotiating, and coordinating the efforts of multiple interdisciplinary stakeholders.
• Establishes operational dashboards, project plans, project management structures, and control methodologies to ensure requests and projects are completed on time and within budget.
• Ensures that risks are monitored and that risk mitigation strategies (including critical path analysis) are implemented when necessary.
• Oversees the design of system workflows by using expert knowledge to match business requirements to technology options.
• Performs business process analysis techniques and collaborates with internal and external stakeholders to deliver value-added solutions while optimizing controls, standardization, and efficiency.
• Applies the concepts and principles of change management, ensuring appropriate communication strategies are in place for operational pipelines, new projects, and business process changes.
• Collaborates and works proactively with technical and business stakeholders to benchmark, review, recommend, and execute developments to meet business needs and manage expectations.
• Builds business cases as needed.
• Understands system interdependencies, aligns with other sectors on preventing cross-system or cross-module issues, and implements testing strategies.
• Ensures the adoption of change and project management techniques and provides regular updates to business stakeholders once a change is approved.
• Stays abreast of new technology, work methods, and techniques associated with its application portfolio.
• Proactively seeks opportunities to learn and leverage new market trends and emerging technologies and seeks the input of subject matter experts to understand their applicability.
• In collaboration with IT experts, builds the deployment, testing, and migration strategies around changes, releases, and improvements.
• Oversees the execution and communication of improvements and ensures a successful transition from testing to production environments.
• Maintains and strengthens relationships with key stakeholders and serves as a key point of contact for escalated questions and concerns.
• Allocates resources to train and support end-users and maintain user guides and videos.
• Supports change management and communication initiatives and ensures the team has a customer-service excellence culture.
• Enables decision-making for faculties and services by allocating and coordinating the resources needed to create system reports that ensure strategic and operational effectiveness and efficiency.
• Owns the relationship with the technology providers of its application ecosystem and oversees recurrent interactions between providers and the team.
• Supports annual business reviews with technology providers to ensure their performance and promotes synergy between the two parties.

Benefits

• Employment equity
• Accessible, barrier-free work environment
• Accommodation during recruitment, assessment and selection processes for applicants with disabilities

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior