Lead, Enterprise Operations

Job Description

What we’re looking for;

In keeping with our current business needs, we are looking for a person who meets the criteria indicated below

Reporting to the Chief Enterprise & Public Sector Officer, the role purpose is as highlighted below;

The Head of Enterprise Operations is strategically responsible lead enterprise automation to simplify commercial operations & planning, strategic pricing, deal structuring, end-to-end post-sale service activation, order-to-cash orchestration, and service management across Safaricom’s Enterprise and Public Sector portfolio.

The role will drive Enterprise process simplification and automation as it ensures seamless execution from contract signature through provisioning, activation, billing readiness, SLA governance, and ongoing service reliability. It safeguards enterprise customer experience by embedding disciplined service management frameworks, structured escalation governance, process simplification, and automation across the Lead → Order → Delivery → Care lifecycle. It will also lead in deal pricing, bid management and care.

Operating within a highly cross-functional environment, the role partners closely with Enterprise Sales, Converged Business Solutions, Cloud & IOT, Systems Integration & Enterprise Platforms, Technology (TES), Finance, Risk, and Customer Care teams to ensure timely delivery, contract compliance, billing accuracy, and service continuity.

The Head of Enterprise Operations acts as the commercial and operational integrator for enterprise customers, ensuring that complex ICT, cloud, cybersecurity, IoT, managed services, and public sector solutions are priced and delivered are profitable and are done with reliability & transparently within enterprise-grade performance standards.

As guardian of Enterprise customer lifetime value and experience, the Head of Operations will be responsible for driving optimal commercial value, seamless delivery, adoption, retention, and expansion of Enterprise customers lifetime value.

Thus, the Head of Enterprise Operations is strategically accountable for:

• Process Simplification & Automation: Drive continuous improvement initiatives to simplify enterprise operational workflows, reduce cycle time, and embed automation across provisioning and service management processes.

• Order-to-Cash Orchestration: Lead end-to-end enterprise order management from post-sale handover to activation, ensuring timely provisioning, billing readiness, and seamless contract execution.

• Service Activation & Delivery Governance: Ensure structured coordination with Technology and Systems Integration teams to activate complex enterprise and public sector solutions within agreed timelines and scope.

• SLA Management & Service Reliability: Own SLA governance across enterprise accounts, ensuring compliance with uptime, performance, and contractual service obligations.

• Escalation & Incident Governance: Establish structured escalation frameworks for high-severity incidents, ensuring rapid resolution, root cause analysis, and customer communication transparency.

• Business Continuity: Ensures strong business continuity by governing the enterprise-wide resilience framework, leading comprehensive business impact analyses and establishing robust recovery plans for all critical functions.

• Risk Controls: Embed effective controls, managing incidents and issues, strengthening first line assurance and safeguarding the enterprise from operational losses, compliance gaps, and repeat failures.

• Retention Care: Proactively managing enterprise customer risk, strengthening lifecycle experience, and driving cross functional interventions to reduce churn, improve service quality, and protect long term revenue.

• Customer Support & Service Experience: Oversee enterprise-grade support frameworks ensuring consistent, proactive, and responsive service management aligned to JNPS and retention objectives.

• Billing Readiness & Revenue Realization: Partner with Finance to ensure accurate billing, dispute management, and minimized revenue leakage post-activation.

• Deal Pricing: Drive end to end commercial deal structuring ensuring optimal pricing for all commercial offers with proper governance to drive profitability and value to the customers

• Operational Risk & Compliance: Embed operational risk controls, contract compliance governance, and audit readiness frameworks across enterprise delivery operations.

• Bid Management: Ensure the organisation delivers timely, compliant, and commercially robust enterprise bids that maximise win probability while safeguarding financial, operational, and contractual integrity.

Anchored on Safaricom’s purpose of Transforming Lives, this role ensures that enterprise and public sector customers receive reliable, secure, and high-performance digital services that power business continuity, institutional resilience, and national digital progress.

Responsibilities

Key accountabilities and decision ownership:

Order-to-Cash Orchestration

• Lead end-to-end order management from post-sale handover through provisioning, activation, billing readiness, and service handover.

• Establish structured order governance frameworks to ensure completeness and accuracy of contract-to-delivery transitions.

• Monitor activation turnaround times and eliminate bottlenecks across provisioning workflows.

• Ensure seamless coordination between Sales, Solutions, Technology, and Finance during delivery.

• Track order fallout, rejection rates, and rework drivers to improve first time-right activation.

• Drive continuous improvement of order-to-cash cycle time to accelerate revenue realization.

Service Activation & Delivery Governance

• Coordinate cross-functional delivery of complex ICT, cloud, cybersecurity, IoT, and managed service solutions.

• Oversee implementation timelines for enterprise and public sector contracts.

• Ensure deployment readiness through structured project and delivery alignment forums.

• Validate solution scope adherence before go-live.

• Monitor delivery performance against contracted milestones.

• Escalate risks proactively where delivery timelines or scope are at risk.

SLA Management & Service Reliability

• Own SLA governance across enterprise portfolio, ensuring uptime, availability, and performance compliance.

• Track service reliability metrics across connectivity, cloud, and managed services.

• Drive structured performance reviews with Technology and support teams.

• Identify recurring failure patterns and lead root cause elimination initiatives.

• Implement preventive maintenance and reliability enhancement programs.

• Protect enterprise revenue by minimizing SLA penalties and service credits.

Escalation & Incident Governance

• Establish tiered escalation frameworks for high-severity enterprise incidents.

• Lead crisis response coordination across technical and support teams.

• Ensure transparent and timely communication with enterprise and public sector clients during outages.

• Oversee post-incident reviews and corrective action tracking.

• Maintain incident trend dashboards to identify systemic issues.

• Reduce mean time to resolve (MTTR) across enterprise support channels.

Risk Control

• Own the Enterprise Operational Risk Framework: Define, implement, and continuously improve policies, control standards, and risk appetite; ensure robust RCSA, KRIs/KCIs, and control testing across all operational domains.

• Strengthen First Line Controls & Assurance by embedding preventive/detective controls in core processes and control remediation with clear owners and timelines.

• Oversee incident reporting, root cause analysis, and loss event capture; close the loop with corrective/preventive actions and governance that reduces repeat incidents and operational losses.

• Implement due diligence and ongoing monitoring for vendors/partners; integrate risk sign offs into projects, system changes, and product launches (e.g., change risk, data/privacy, cyber adjacent operational controls).

• Maintain tested business continuity and disaster recovery plans; ensure adherence to regulatory/ISO standards; provide clear risk dashboards to EXCO/Board and drive culture of control excellence.

Business Continuity

• Own and govern the Enterprise Business Continuity Framework, ensuring policies, standards, and resilience requirements are embedded across all operational units and critical enterprise processes.

• Lead Business Impact Analyses (BIA) to identify critical functions, recovery priorities, resource dependencies, and acceptable downtime thresholds across the enterprise value chain.

• Ensure robust and tested Business Continuity Plans (BCP) for all high risk functions, including crisis management protocols, communication plans, recovery strategies, and alternate site readiness.

• Drive end to end resilience testing, including simulation exercises, disaster recovery drills, and post exercise remediation with measurable improvements in readiness and recovery time.

• Provide reporting and assurance, using resilience dashboards, risk indicators, and compliance scorecards to inform leadership and ensure regulatory/ISO adherence.

Retention Care

• Own the end to end retention strategy for enterprise clients, ensuring proactive engagement, contract management and value based interventions to minimise churn.

• Establish proactive risk management mechanisms, using insights, early warning indicators, usage trends, and sentiment analytics to identify at risk accounts and trigger timely retention actions.

• Drive high touch account lifecycle management, ensuring seamless onboarding, service quality, issue resolution, and continuous value extraction to strengthen loyalty.

• Coordinate cross functional retention squads (Sales, Service Operations, Networks, Billing, Finance) to resolve systemic pain points, service failures, or commercial blockers impacting customer experience.

• Improve retention performance and NPS, using structured governance, dashboards, root cause elimination, and customer back initiatives to secure long term relationships and revenue continuity.

Process Simplification & Automation

• Define Enterprise Automation roadmap that will guide future investment

• Identify manual and fragmented enterprise processes and drive simplification initiatives.

• Lead automation programs across provisioning, ticketing, and service assurance workflows.

• Embed digital tools for order tracking, customer visibility, and operational reporting.

• Reduce operational cycle times through workflow redesign.

• Improve cost-to-serve metrics through structured operational efficiencies.

• Drive adoption of enterprise self-service portals and automation-enabled support.

Customer Support & Service Experience

• Oversee enterprise-grade support models aligned to customer tiering frameworks.

• Institutionalize proactive service management for strategic accounts.

• Monitor enterprise jNPS and customer satisfaction metrics.

• Ensure structured Quarterly Service Reviews for high-value clients.

• Partner with Sales to drive retention through superior service experience.

• Embed continuous feedback loops to improve post-sale customer engagement.

Billing Readiness & Revenue Realization

• Partner with Finance to ensure accurate billing configuration and readiness at activation.

• Monitor billing accuracy and dispute rates across enterprise portfolio.

• Reduce billing-related escalations and revenue leakage.

• Track revenue realization timelines from activation to first invoice.

• Ensure compliance with contractual pricing and billing terms.

• Improve Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) through structured dispute and billing governance.

Commercial Operation

• Deliver Enterprise Business excellence all Enterprise Sectors

• Strengthen Pricing Governance, Margin Discipline & Value Realization

• Enable Data Driven Revenue Growth Across Enterprise, SME & Public Sector

• Build Scalable, Digitized & Efficient Commercial Operations

• Strengthen Customer Centricity & Sector Specific operation Support

• Enable Operational Efficiency & Scalability

• Strengthen Governance, Risk & Compliance in Commercial Practices

• Enhance Partner & Ecosystem Commercial Performance

• Elevate Customer Value Delivery Across All Segments

• Accelerate Digital Transformation of Commercial Systems & Tools

Bid Management

• Lead end to end bid governance, ensuring all enterprise bids are commercially viable, compliant, and aligned to organisational strategy, risk thresholds, and profitability expectations.

• Oversee the development of bid responses, coordinating cross functional inputs (Sales, Finance, Legal, Technology, Supply Chain) to produce compelling and competitive proposals.

• Establish and enforce bid management frameworks, approval matrices, pricing governance, and quality standards to improve bid consistency and reduce commercial and contractual exposure.

• Drive rigorous opportunity qualification, bid/no bid decisions, and pursuit strategies using data driven analysis of feasibility, risk, resource requirements, and competitive positioning.

• Ensure timely submission of bids by managing bid timelines, resources, documentation, and stakeholder engagement to meet customer and regulatory requirements.

• Monitor bid performance, win/loss trends, pricing patterns, and customer insights to continuously improve bid strategies, enhance win rates, and strengthen commercial effectiveness.

Leadership & Talent Development

• Coach, mentor, and empower the leadership team to drive strategic excellence, collaboration, and disruptive thinking.

• Drive diversity, inclusion, and leadership bench strength, ensuring succession readiness for pivotal roles within the function.

• Build critical capabilities through targeted hiring and continuous learning programs.

• Institutionalize a functional Academy - develop playbooks, methodologies, and training for execution, and digital-first innovation models.

• Embed OKRs and a performance-driven culture, aligning incentives to strategic impact, and innovation.

• Champion cross-functional collaboration across Safaricom to ensure integrated delivery of products.

• Lead change management for major shifts (new operating models, and innovation platforms) with clear narratives, stakeholder engagement, and adoption tracking.

• Foster a culture of agility and experimentation, encouraging teams to pilot emerging technologies, new business models, and disruptive solutions.

• Model ethical leadership and values, reinforcing integrity, transparency, and responsible innovation in all strategic decisions.

• Ensure governance and compliance in all initiatives, safeguarding organizational reputation and stakeholder trust.

• Champion adoption of emerging technologies (AI, IoT, cloud, blockchain) to enable disruptive innovation and digital transformation.

Qualifications

Must have technical / professional qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Telecommunications Engineering, Electrical Engineering, ICT, Computer Science, Business Administration, Operations Management, or a related field from a recognized institution

• Master’s degree in Business Administration (MBA), Operations Management, Telecommunications Management, or Strategic Management is required

• Minimum of 10–12 years’ progressive experience in enterprise service delivery, telecom operations, ICT operations, managed services, or large-scale customer operations within a regulated technology environment

• Demonstrated experience managing end-to-end order-to-cash processes including provisioning, activation, billing readiness, and service assurance

• Strong understanding of enterprise ICT environments including connectivity, cloud, cybersecurity, IoT, managed services, and complex multi-vendor solutions

• Proven experience in SLA governance, service management frameworks, and enterprise-grade incident management processes

• Certification in IT Service Management frameworks such as ITIL (v3 or v4) is required

• Project management certification such as PMP, PRINCE2, or equivalent is required or strongly preferred

• Demonstrated experience in operational process design, automation initiatives, and workflow optimization within large-scale organizations

• Strong knowledge of telecom network architecture and service assurance systems sufficient to coordinate effectively with Technology and Network teams

• Proven experience working in highly matrixed environments collaborating with Sales, Finance, Risk, Legal, and Technology functions

• Demonstrated capability in managing high-severity customer escalations and crisis response coordination

• Strong analytical capability with proficiency in CRM systems, order management platforms, billing systems, and operational performance dashboards

• Experience embedding operational risk controls, compliance frameworks, and audit readiness processes within enterprise operations

• Demonstrated commitment to integrity, regulatory compliance, and responsible operational governance aligned to Safaricom’s Code of Conduct

How to apply If you feel that you are up to the challenge and possess the necessary qualification and experience, kindly click on the apply button. Remember to attach your resume