Senior Change Manager/Technical Communicator

Applied Information Sciences - Reston, VA

Full-time - Senior

Reston, VA

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

About the position

As a Senior Change Manager/Technical Communicator at Applied Information Sciences, you will play a pivotal role in aligning with multiple cross-functional teams to deliver cloud-based enterprise technology solutions that advance mission-critical business and compliance goals across five or more workstreams. This position is designed for individuals who are passionate about finding innovative solutions and excited about emerging technologies and capabilities. You will be responsible for both managing other change managers and technical communicators while also performing organizational change management (OCM) and technical communication work yourself. This includes designing, developing, implementing, and evaluating strategies to ensure that all user groups and stakeholders are adequately prepared for the changes that arise from each workstream. Your responsibilities will include engaging people and the enterprise in change by applying sound practices to optimize the business value of technical solutions. You will create comprehensive plans that identify stakeholders, assess the impact of changes, and implement appropriate strategies to equip users to navigate the change effectively. Additionally, you will align change efforts with the team's agile or other methods for developing, deploying, adopting, and optimizing the solution. Facilitating client and internal meetings and presentations will also be a key part of your role. Using state-of-the-art technical communication practices, you will design and develop communication plans and content for various audiences, including both written and visual materials. This involves developing core messages and digital or print campaigns for each workstream, determining the sequence and channels for communication, and executing on delivery while monitoring the effectiveness of these communications. You will also contribute to a content management system and other component-based approaches to ensure effectiveness and consistency across workstreams. In this role, you will identify performance support needs and strengths for each workstream, providing expertise in learning solution design, development, implementation, and evaluation using industry best practices. Understanding and managing risk and opportunity, as well as using data to evaluate and track the effectiveness of change management, communications, and performance support initiatives, will be essential. You will adhere to team style guides for documentation deliverables while innovating within those principles to create tailored materials. Managing a high volume of projects to keep pace with shifting release schedules and business priorities will be crucial to ensure that project deliverables are completed on time and meet specified requirements with high quality.

Responsibilities

• Engage people and an enterprise in change, applying sound practices to optimize the business value of technical solutions.
• Create plans, including identifying stakeholders, assessing the impact of changes, and implementing appropriate strategies to equip users to navigate the change effectively.
• Align change efforts with the team's agile or other methods for developing, deploying, adopting, and optimizing the solution.
• Facilitate client and internal meetings and presentations.
• Design and develop communication plans and content (written and visual) for different audiences using state-of-the-art technical communication practices.
• Develop core messages and digital and/or print campaigns for each workstream, determining sequence and channels and executing on delivery, launching and monitoring communications.
• Contribute to a content management system and other component-based approaches to reuse content and ensure effectiveness and consistency across workstreams.
• Identify performance support needs and strengths for each workstream, providing learning and development domain expertise in learning solution design, development, implementation, and evaluation.
• Understand and manage risk and opportunity and tradeoffs between the two; use data to evaluate and track effectiveness of change management, communications, and performance support initiatives.
• Adhere to team style guides for a suite of standard documentation deliverables but innovate within style principles to create tailored documentation materials.
• Manage a high volume of projects to keep pace with shifting release schedules and business priorities, ensuring project deliverables and activities are completed on time, to the specified requirements, and are of high quality.

Requirements

• Experience effectively leading teams, scrums, and supporting high performance within a team.
• Experience guiding IT or other organizations through realignments, working with scrum masters, architects, developers, managers, executives, users, and subject matter experts.
• Ability to use data to understand a situation and refine approaches or stay the course.
• Understanding of organizational design and culture, business concepts, and change management or organization development, especially in relation to how moving to the cloud affects organizations.
• Demonstrated client-services orientation in complex, evolving situations, able to work effectively at all levels of a client organization and internally, serving as a trusted advisor to the client.
• Shift seamlessly between writing precise instructional documentation and more conversational, benefit-focused promotional announcements.
• Strong technical writing and presentation skills, skilled communicator and listener, verbally and in writing, in English, to a wide range of users.
• Commitment to continuous learning to stay current and relevant.
• Fluent user of Microsoft Word, PPT, and Excel.
• Ability to grasp technologies and technical concepts quickly.
• Bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university.

Nice-to-haves

• Facilitation skills
• Microsoft certification(s), especially Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)
• Experience with Azure and/or M365 implementations