The NYC Financial Information Services Agency - Office of Payroll Administration (FISA-OPA) maintains the financial and payroll systems of the City of New York. FISA-OPA is seeking a highly motivated and experienced Deputy Entity Director for the Comptroller's Office Accounting Business Team. The Deputy Entity Director will serve as second-in-command to the Entity Manager and as a liaison between FISA-OPA and the Comptroller's Office, which is responsible for managing the City's accounting system and producing the City's Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR). Collaborating with a team of 7 Business Analysts, this individual will support the direction and upkeep of all accounting components of the City's Financial Management System (FMS3). This position reports to the Entity Manager of the Comptroller's Office Business Team. As Deputy Entity Director of the Comptroller's Office Business Team, the individual has the following responsibilities:
Professional Development
Assist in managing the workload of the team by assigning tasks, prioritizing workload and monitoring status.
- Support the consistent use of standard processes by business analysts for business event documentation, ad-hoc reporting, requirements definition and functional design. Assist in authoring and maintaining standard operating procedures for the Accounting Team.
- Foster a collaborative team environment that encourages open information sharing and input from all team members.
- Support staff development through training, coaching, feedback and assignment of tasks that allow for growth.
- Serve as a backup point of contact with other FISA-OPA teams (e.g., development, testing, infrastructure, etc.) and support representation of the Comptroller's Office interests as it pertains to the FMS/3 application and IT operations.
Business Analysis
- While serving as Deputy Entity Director, the individual will also be expected to perform the activities of a business analyst in the group as necessary.
- Subject matter expertise is a pre-requisite for the position, and the candidate will support thought leadership defining: practical solutions for data requests, software enhancements, advanced configurations and translating operational requests for production control teams.
Business Event Support
- Supporting the Comptroller's Office business events, the individual will assist in overseeing design and execution of cross-team task plans for operational, system configuration, and system reconciliation activities in FMS. Assist in overseeing the assignment and execution of ad-hoc application activities (e.g., ad-hoc reports, mass changes, etc) as the Comptroller's Office produces the City of New York's Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (ACFR). Business events, system upgrades, and mass data events are generally executed during times when the system is off-line for batch processing or maintenance. The Deputy Entity Director is expected to be able to provide evening or weekend support for these events.
- Assist in overseeing business event simulations. Analysts run simulations of business event processing and provide: detailed status reporting on progress, detailed inventory of defects identified and in the scope of regression testing for the event.
- Provide professional editorial review of bulletins ensuring conciseness, accuracy in clear terms understandable by the FMS user population.
Entity/Customer Relationship
- Interface with the Comptroller's Office business owners as necessary to support delivery performance of the Comptroller's Office Entity team.
- Serve as a secondary point of contact for communications with the Comptroller's Office (including authoring of communications and review of draft communications from team members).
- Collaborate across internal FISA-OPA teams, the Comptroller's Office, other oversight and line and external agencies while building strong partnerships. Foster open channels of communication that ensure smooth and stable Financial System operations.
Application Portfolio Support
- Support the prioritization and planning of Comptroller's Office-related software changes in FMS3. Assist in determining need-in-production dates, reconciling dates with other team constraints, performing aspects of release planning (e.g., managing the functional or technical dependencies between related changes), and ensuring that planned releases have business analysts available to cover the scheduled workload.
- Orchestrate end-user meeting(s) as needed to gather requirements, gain consensus between parties on business issues – while taking and publishing meeting minutes, creating and presenting deliverables for review.
- Analyze and document business requirements and non-functional requirements of proposed software solutions. Typical solutions come in the form of new reports, enhancements to existing reports, data fixes, mass data changes (as a substitute for large-scale data entry), new / modified batch processes, new / modified online transactions and inquiries, advanced configuration changes, security configuration changes, new / modified batch interfaces, etc.
- Author functional design documents that capture the details of the solution in all aspects, e.g., workflow requirements, business validations to be performed on data entry forms, formulas to be applied in calculations on inquiries and reports, presentation layer requirements on inquiries and reports, definition of inputs/outputs and business logic of batch processes, configuration profile, application data configuration changes required to enact the business or processing change, etc. The documentation produced will follow FISA's standard for functional designs.
- Support development teams by refining requirements and providing SME support during technical design, build and unit test phases, and similar support to infrastructure teams during hardware and systems software design/upgrade/install activities.
- Support testing teams by reviewing test cases to ensure appropriate functional coverage. Provide analytical SME support as testing issues/questions arise.
- As necessary and requested, serve as a proxy for end users by developing and executing User Acceptance Test (UAT) segments – with documented test results signed off by business owners.
- Support operations teams as software fixes/enhancements, data fixes, and mass data changes are tested and coordinate scheduling of production execution (performing production validation tasks as necessary).
Strategic Projects
- The Deputy Entity Director will be expected to support the Entity Manager in a lead role as we upgrade the FMS/3 to a SaaS supported platform.
- The candidate will assist in the review of deliverables, ensuring vendor deliverables meet City requirements and quality standards.
- The candidate will support the process of supplying requirements for operational, conversion, interface, core accounting, tax, reporting, compliance, audit work tracks of the upgrade.
Call Center / Ticket L2/L3 Support
- The individual will ensure that all tickets escalated to the Accounting Business team from the FISA Call Center (L1) or FACT Team (L2) are clearly acknowledged, assigned and worked to resolution. Note: Similar end-user requests from the Comptroller's Office may come directly to the Accounting team.
- The candidate will be expected to assist in providing metrics for Comptroller service requests and Call Center tickets.
- Candidate will assist in providing a consolidated view of staff assignments for work initiated from Comptroller's Office, internal operational projects, and tickets originating from the Call Center – ensuring visibility into the overall workload for the group.
Accounting Operations Support
- Candidate will, in partnership with the Comptroller's Office and the Entity Manager, support building an annual calendar of system processing events to ensure compliance with GASB standards and business deadlines.
- Serves as a secondary liaison with external auditors and City leadership during critical reporting needs.
- Support management of periodic disbursement (check) operational requests (e.g., signatory changes).
- Inform oversight of banking-related issues, track and participate in activities required to bring issues to closure (e.g., transmission failure).
- Serve as a backup business escalation point for critical failures in the nightly batch cycle.
Preferred Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:
- Excellent communication (oral and written), interpersonal, and organizational skills are required
- Strong analytical and problem solving skills (i.e. analysis, problem re-creation and very detailed oriented) – specifically within accounting or budget business domains
- Excellent customer service skills
- Ability to work independently with minimal direction and under pressure with tight deadlines
- Hands-on proven experience balancing and reconciling financial data sets
- Extensive knowledge of the City's accounting business model, annual fiscal operations and financial reporting structures unique to municipal government
- Experience working in a large organization with complex accounting processes
- Extensive knowledge and experience working with FMS accounting or budgeting applications or FMS3 Worker's Compensation
- Demonstrated proficiency with Microsoft Office products (Word, Visio, Project, Excel, PowerPoint)
- Extensive experience working with data mining / reporting tools such as Oracle SQL developer, Crystal Reports, MS Access, Business Objects, Power BI.
- Ability speak in front of a user group and clearly describe how business functions are executed from within the FISA-OPA Financial System software and exception process / usage scenarios
- Demonstrated ability performing project management activities