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Development Director
at EA
India (Hyderabad)
Role Overview
An EA Development Director Level helps provide daily team leadership. Key responsibilities include: interpret design documents and establish a clear picture of project scope and create accurate development estimates; monitoring change requests and predicting/seeing significant changes to project scope and updating appropriate parties; interpret a project schedule and monitor the progress of individual tasks against that schedule and reporting schedule variances to the appropriate parties; procure necessary resources based on established needs; regularly reviews performance and holds timely discussions; provides day-to-day coaching and mentoring to team (career coaching, time management etc.) and works in conjunction with direct manager to resolve any team issues; provides career counseling to team members' and communicates desires and career ambitions to senior management; works with senior management on recruiting efforts; coordinating interviews, candidate assessment and provides feedback to senior management for hiring decisions; motivates team members and provides ongoing coaching and support; responsible for effectively dealing with minor production problems and co-ordinating staff towards a resolution; participate in the departmental strategic and tactical planning process (with the assistance of departmental leads); identifies gaps in existing departmental processes and recommends and implements viable process
Position Title: Development Director Department: Central Development Services
Location: EA India, Hyderabad
Electronic Arts is seeking a Development Director to join our Hyderabad Technology Center (HTC) organization. HTC develops, extends & maintains a wide range of tools, workflow solutions & products used across multiple EA studios. HTC also provides a growing set of software development services in the areas of QA automation, Whitebox test engineering, Custom tool development and Automation execution & analysis.
The DD is responsible for the professional and career advancement of the staff reporting to them and will collaborate closely with other EA worldwide teams within and external to HTC including Quality Assurance, Production, Central development teams, and Game development teams. DDIs are the keepers of the project schedule and play a vital role in successfully moving the development team from one project phase to the next while ensuring a strong focus on customer service and communication.
Position Overview
This DD position manages a team of software engineers responsible for developing and maintaining leading edge automation solutions. This role has overall responsibility for the HTC automation engineering service – including quality, timely delivery, communication & customer satisfaction. The DD is responsible for efficient team utilization both for internal staff as well as external contractors. This role needs to provide transparency & visibility into project related information as well as business KPIs/metrics for customer satisfaction, billed hours & resource utilization.
Key Responsibilities
Project Management:
- Produce a WBS (work breakdown structure) for each project & establish success criteria for each task
- Resource planning, validate scope & effort, determine & track dependencies
- Overall project schedules, project estimation & priority setting based on individual tasks
- Appropriate task assignment. Monitor & track project tasks to ensure timely completion through effective resource management
- Timely stakeholder communication – Expectation setting, variance in schedule or scope
- Process adherence. Take corrective actions for process gaps & inefficiencies
- Quality Management. Test plan creation, test life cycle management
- Change request process. Impact analysis & communication for each change request
- Risk management. Assess, track, mitigate & manage risk for each project. Update a risk register for each project
- Maintain up-to-date tracking information for fulltime & contract staff
Customer Relationship Management:
- Ensure a high level of customer satisfaction
- Regular, timely communication, expectation setting & priority management
- Provide process documentation to customers, clarify processes to all stakeholders
- Maintain a high level of customer engagement through regular project meetings & other forms of gathering feedback
- Interpret customer requirements & communicate to the team; anticipate future needs of customers
- Provide solutions to problems faced by customers
- Continuous improvement in quality & efficacy of the service/automation function within EA
Leadership & Management:
- Build a high performing team; provide the right challenges and developmental opportunities to ensure that all employees realize their potential
- Build and maintain effective working relationships with stakeholders in distributed teams to ensure successful completion of projects
- Provide timely reports & project/business metrics. Be equally effective in managing up, down & laterally
- Create & refine process documentation for each service type/engagement/project; enroll stakeholders in all process creation/improvement initiatives. Constantly improve processes to raise the overall quality of the service
- Motivate the team to focus on delivering high standards of quality, not just timely completion of tasks
- Continually enhance personal knowledge about automation and actively offer input when needed
- Adopt company-wide best practices, technologies and tools to create efficiencies
- Ensure that adequate equipment, tools and support are provided to team
Participate in recruitment to ensure that qualified & suitable candidates are hired
- Provide inspiring leadership by proactively meeting or communicating with employees individually to monitor and prevent potential problems or concerns
- Reward and recognize performers; provide coaching on performance related issues; conduct employee performance evaluations
- Participate in development of retention programs; create career action plans with the team
- Identify potential growth, training & developmental opportunities
- Provide input for departmental planning (i.e. resource planning, cost estimates, process & workflow improvements etc.)
Additional responsibilities for this position may include:
- Collaborate with other DDs, Technical Directors, and Producers to ship a high quality game on time and on budget
- Work with other DDs on creating project proposals, resource plans, budgets, knowledge transition & training plans
- Participate in initiatives outside the team that affect the business unit or studio; e.g. recruiting, training, human resources, workflow improvements, quality of life, facilities
Required Skills and Experience
MUST HAVE
- Working experience with Microsoft technologies (e.g C#, .NET, C++, SQL server)
- 4 – 5 years of experience managing software development projects; total experience of at least 8 years. Minimum 2 years of team leadership experience
- Strong people management skills; ability to challenge and develop talent
- Talent acquisition & recruitment, solid interviewing techniques
- Experience with various software development lifecycles (with emphasis on Agile methodologies)
- Strong process orientation & ability to develop the right processes that optimize and simplify workflows & project activities
- Understanding of project management methodologies; can model systems and reports using Excel, Project, Word, VISIO and other EA standard tools
NICE TO HAVE / DESIRABLE
- QA Automation & Test Engineering domain
- Hands on experience with automation engineering in C#/.Net
- Passionate about software quality
Performance Competencies:
- Ability to successfully track complex projects & processes and manage successful completion of many small detailed steps
- Ability to build and energize a team by example; is comfortable moving beyond micro-management of staff and delegating responsibility; can coach and lead effectively
- Effective conflict management; stays objective and fair when dealing with sensitive situations and uses win-win approach to negotiate or resolve conflict
- Excellent listening and communication skills; can interpret non verbal messages; ability to communicate team and project goals in a clear, concise and strategic manner
- Highly effective interaction skills
- Takes ownership and sees projects through despite obstacles and difficult circumstances; demonstrates a sense of dependability and commitment
- Excellent analytical and problem solving skills; recognizes and balances priorities and identifies new methods to deal with issues
- Ability to find creative solutions to problems
- Quickly learns and applies new concepts, principles and procedures to maintain solution-oriented approach while dealing with change; deals with ambiguity by asking questions or championing solutions
An EA Development Director Level helps provide daily team leadership. Key responsibilities include: interpret design documents and establish a clear picture of project scope and create accurate development estimates; monitoring change requests and predicting/seeing significant changes to project scope and updating appropriate parties; interpret a project schedule and monitor the progress of individual tasks against that schedule and reporting schedule variances to the appropriate parties; procure necessary resources based on established needs; regularly reviews performance and holds timely discussions; provides day-to-day coaching and mentoring to team (career coaching, time management etc.) and works in conjunction with direct manager to resolve any team issues; provides career counseling to team members' and communicates desires and career ambitions to senior management; works with senior management on recruiting efforts; coordinating interviews, candidate assessment and provides feedback to senior management for hiring decisions; motivates team members and provides ongoing coaching and support; responsible for effectively dealing with minor production problems and co-ordinating staff towards a resolution; participate in the departmental strategic and tactical planning process (with the assistance of departmental leads); identifies gaps in existing departmental processes and recommends and implements viable process
Position Title: Development Director Department: Central Development Services
Location: EA India, Hyderabad
Electronic Arts is seeking a Development Director to join our Hyderabad Technology Center (HTC) organization. HTC develops, extends & maintains a wide range of tools, workflow solutions & products used across multiple EA studios. HTC also provides a growing set of software development services in the areas of QA automation, Whitebox test engineering, Custom tool development and Automation execution & analysis.
The DD is responsible for the professional and career advancement of the staff reporting to them and will collaborate closely with other EA worldwide teams within and external to HTC including Quality Assurance, Production, Central development teams, and Game development teams. DDIs are the keepers of the project schedule and play a vital role in successfully moving the development team from one project phase to the next while ensuring a strong focus on customer service and communication.
Position Overview
This DD position manages a team of software engineers responsible for developing and maintaining leading edge automation solutions. This role has overall responsibility for the HTC automation engineering service – including quality, timely delivery, communication & customer satisfaction. The DD is responsible for efficient team utilization both for internal staff as well as external contractors. This role needs to provide transparency & visibility into project related information as well as business KPIs/metrics for customer satisfaction, billed hours & resource utilization.
Key Responsibilities
Project Management:
- Produce a WBS (work breakdown structure) for each project & establish success criteria for each task
- Resource planning, validate scope & effort, determine & track dependencies
- Overall project schedules, project estimation & priority setting based on individual tasks
- Appropriate task assignment. Monitor & track project tasks to ensure timely completion through effective resource management
- Timely stakeholder communication – Expectation setting, variance in schedule or scope
- Process adherence. Take corrective actions for process gaps & inefficiencies
- Quality Management. Test plan creation, test life cycle management
- Change request process. Impact analysis & communication for each change request
- Risk management. Assess, track, mitigate & manage risk for each project. Update a risk register for each project
- Maintain up-to-date tracking information for fulltime & contract staff
Customer Relationship Management:
- Ensure a high level of customer satisfaction
- Regular, timely communication, expectation setting & priority management
- Provide process documentation to customers, clarify processes to all stakeholders
- Maintain a high level of customer engagement through regular project meetings & other forms of gathering feedback
- Interpret customer requirements & communicate to the team; anticipate future needs of customers
- Provide solutions to problems faced by customers
- Continuous improvement in quality & efficacy of the service/automation function within EA
Leadership & Management:
- Build a high performing team; provide the right challenges and developmental opportunities to ensure that all employees realize their potential
- Build and maintain effective working relationships with stakeholders in distributed teams to ensure successful completion of projects
- Provide timely reports & project/business metrics. Be equally effective in managing up, down & laterally
- Create & refine process documentation for each service type/engagement/project; enroll stakeholders in all process creation/improvement initiatives. Constantly improve processes to raise the overall quality of the service
- Motivate the team to focus on delivering high standards of quality, not just timely completion of tasks
- Continually enhance personal knowledge about automation and actively offer input when needed
- Adopt company-wide best practices, technologies and tools to create efficiencies
- Ensure that adequate equipment, tools and support are provided to team
Participate in recruitment to ensure that qualified & suitable candidates are hired
- Provide inspiring leadership by proactively meeting or communicating with employees individually to monitor and prevent potential problems or concerns
- Reward and recognize performers; provide coaching on performance related issues; conduct employee performance evaluations
- Participate in development of retention programs; create career action plans with the team
- Identify potential growth, training & developmental opportunities
- Provide input for departmental planning (i.e. resource planning, cost estimates, process & workflow improvements etc.)
Additional responsibilities for this position may include:
- Collaborate with other DDs, Technical Directors, and Producers to ship a high quality game on time and on budget
- Work with other DDs on creating project proposals, resource plans, budgets, knowledge transition & training plans
- Participate in initiatives outside the team that affect the business unit or studio; e.g. recruiting, training, human resources, workflow improvements, quality of life, facilities
Required Skills and Experience
MUST HAVE
- Working experience with Microsoft technologies (e.g C#, .NET, C++, SQL server)
- 4 – 5 years of experience managing software development projects; total experience of at least 8 years. Minimum 2 years of team leadership experience
- Strong people management skills; ability to challenge and develop talent
- Talent acquisition & recruitment, solid interviewing techniques
- Experience with various software development lifecycles (with emphasis on Agile methodologies)
- Strong process orientation & ability to develop the right processes that optimize and simplify workflows & project activities
- Understanding of project management methodologies; can model systems and reports using Excel, Project, Word, VISIO and other EA standard tools
NICE TO HAVE / DESIRABLE
- QA Automation & Test Engineering domain
- Hands on experience with automation engineering in C#/.Net
- Passionate about software quality
Performance Competencies:
- Ability to successfully track complex projects & processes and manage successful completion of many small detailed steps
- Ability to build and energize a team by example; is comfortable moving beyond micro-management of staff and delegating responsibility; can coach and lead effectively
- Effective conflict management; stays objective and fair when dealing with sensitive situations and uses win-win approach to negotiate or resolve conflict
- Excellent listening and communication skills; can interpret non verbal messages; ability to communicate team and project goals in a clear, concise and strategic manner
- Highly effective interaction skills
- Takes ownership and sees projects through despite obstacles and difficult circumstances; demonstrates a sense of dependability and commitment
- Excellent analytical and problem solving skills; recognizes and balances priorities and identifies new methods to deal with issues
- Ability to find creative solutions to problems
- Quickly learns and applies new concepts, principles and procedures to maintain solution-oriented approach while dealing with change; deals with ambiguity by asking questions or championing solutions