Head of IT Key Customer Program (f/m/x)

Step out of your comfort zone, excel and redefine the limits of what is possible. That's just what our employees are doing every single day – in order to set the pace through our innovations and enable outstanding achievements. After all, behind every successful company are many great fascinating people.
In a spacious modern setting full of opportunities for further development, ZEISS employees work in a place where expert knowledge and team spirit reign supreme. All of this is supported by a special ownership structure and the long-term goal of the Carl Zeiss Foundation: to bring science and society into the future together.

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As the Head of IT – Key Customer Program, you will be responsible for leading a team and driving the IT developments across all functions, IT departments and global processes for our biggest key customer program. In this role you will be challenged to simultaneously use your understanding of business processes as well as IT system architecture to steer the transformation together with business partners from all functions, the IT line leaders, program management as well as customer personnel. You will be successful by using your leadership skills, outstanding capacity for abstraction and your problem-solving skills.

• Taking responsibility for the analysis and coordination of the elaboration of global processes and requirements in alignment with business representatives and IT experts
• Ensuring business-side implementation of the entire distributed IT and process architecture required for the customer program within time and budget based on appropriate effort, cost and time planning
• Leading the governance for the alignment of specification, standardization and customization needs
• Monitoring of the implementation to identify deviations and initiate any necessary countermeasures
• Coordination of requirements, timelines and progress with program management and customer personnel
• Defining and implementing countermeasures in case of escalations
• Assuring and steering regular alignment of this transformation with other ongoing processes and key projects within ZEISS Vision Care

• Excellent degree from a leading university in the fields of engineering/business/computer science
• Strong experience in change management and complex transformation projects
• At least 5 years of experience and proven track record in leading medium to large scale process implementation programs with multi-software, cloud solutions and SAP, ideally in industry and consulting environments
• Demonstrated leadership, team motivation, prioritization skills, and experience working in diverse, multi-disciplinary teams
• Experience with programs that are focused on non-SAP processes in a distributed micro-service-based cloud environment
• Strong facilitation, presentation, and communication skills ideally also in German
• Comprehensive understanding of the overall E2E delivery process landscape, as well as interdependencies between other modules and cross-functional integration
• Ability to deal with different stakeholders on difficult requirements regarding standardization and customization needs
• Ability to deal with multiple stakeholders, to reduce complexity and keep focus
• Strong experience in mentoring, skill building, and advanced training
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced, challenging, and uncertain environment