MANAGER – ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS SYSTEMS
About Ascend
Ascend empowers entrepreneurial CPAs to reach their goals with an innovative growth model that brings their firms into the new age. Backed by private equity from people-focused Alpine Investors, Ascend is building a modern platform for regional accounting firms that enables them to stay independent while accessing the resources of a large CPA firm to help them grow. Ascend provides access to growth capital, robust talent acquisition, best-of-breed technology, a catalytic leadership system, shared back-office services, and modernized equity incentives so that firms can surmount today’s industry challenges and reach their full potential. Founded in January 2023, the company attained revenues sufficient to qualify it as a Top 100 U.S. accounting firm within six months of operations.
For more information, visit ascendtogether.com.
About Alpine Investors
Alpine Investors is a people-driven private equity firm that is committed to building great companies by working with, learning from, and developing exceptional people. Alpine prides itself on fostering cultures where people value empowerment, diversity, fairness, integrity, and intellectual honesty. Founded in 2001, Alpine specializes in investments in companies in the software and services industries. Alpine has over $15 billion in AUM and has offices in San Francisco, New York, and Salt Lake City.
For more information on the firm, visit www.alpineinvestors.com
Position Summary
The primary mission for this individual is to provide hands-on expertise in Workday HCM and Financials. The goal would be to support day to day configuration changes, onboarding new partner firms and driving the build, prioritization and execution of feature and capability backlogs to ensure Ascend and the partner firms can fully leverage the investments in these platforms. Additionally, expertise in Salesforce.com would be beneficial.
This role offers the opportunity to work fully remote.
Key Responsibilities
Working with the Chief Information Officer, the Manager – Enterprise Systems Applications will be responsible for the following:
1. Building and maintaining a feature backlog for Workday HCM, Financials and Salesforce.com in order to deliver new capabilities, enhancements and bug fixes on a monthly cadence. Specifically, this will include:
a. Maintaining a clearly developed and prioritized list of user stories and other non-functional requirements for these applications in consultation with the appropriate business partners
b. Rolling out an Agile delivery processes based on scrum methodology to utilize internal onshore/offshore FTEs as well as vendors to deliver on sprint backlogs
c. Conducting retrospectives post sprint to enable continuous improvement
2. Collaborating with Technology Integrations to onboard new firms:
a. Working collaboratively with the Manager of Technology Integrations to onboard newly acquired firms onto Workday on day of closing and Salesforce.com within 30-days of close
b. Building out integration playbook sections specific to Workday and Salesforce to ensure repeatability in process and smooth, error free delivery
c. Executing on integrations using offshore resources
3. Tactical Vendor Management, this will include:
a. Maintaining deep relationships with key contacts within both Salesforce.com and Workday as well as vendors providing professional services in these areas to ensure effective service delivery
b. Maintaining appropriate licensing to ensure we remain compliant while ensuring our costs remain well within budget modelling
c. Keeping track of product release roadmaps from both vendors (Workday and Salesforce) and advise on backlog prioritization to ensure we continue to leverage capabilities that can better serve APS
4. Effectively partnering with other technology leaders to ensure both Workday and Salesforce integrate with Practice Management Tools:
a. Providing thought leadership around data governance and API integrations with other key enterprise applications
b. Providing hands-on guidance to team members on developing and maintaining APS’ integrations using our chosen middleware platform
c. Collaborating with APS’ data leader to develop and run a Data Governance Program to ensure the right applications remain as the right Books of Record. This will ensure that our Data Fabric ingests the right data from the right sources to deliver desired data views for both APS and our partner firms
Qualifications
• Bachelor’s degree in information technology; Master’s a plus.
Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities
o Accomplished professional with unquestionable integrity, a strong work ethic, and demonstrated success implementing and improving reporting processes
o A ‘can-do’, solution-oriented individual and initiative-taking problem solver; intellectually curious, analytical, and committed to self-improvement
o Exceptional organizational and time management skills, including the ability to prioritize tasks in a demanding environment. Able to initiate, manage, and execute projects with minimal supervision
o Excellent verbal and written communication skills to maintain strong relationships with vendors and other stakeholders
o 5 – 10 + years of experience configuring Workday HCM, with demonstrated functional and technical experience
o 3+ years’ experience supporting related Workday products including Learning, Benefits, Prism, and/or Compensation
o Knowledge of Workday security framework, including role-based permissions and user access management
o Experience leading large-scale Workday implementations or upgrades, including project planning, resource allocation, and timeline management
o Domain expertise and experience translating business objectives into technical solutions; the ideal candidate should be able to analyze and optimize business processes across the firm to leverage Workday’s full potential
o Experience working with other business leaders in HR, Finance, IT and other stakeholders to ensure Workday supports business goals
o Experience managing others and managing offshore based employees
o Experience in coordinating first and third-party technical environments
o Experience proactively focusing on quality and scalability in a move-fast culture
At Ascend, we provide a fair and equal employment opportunity for all candidates regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, gender, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, age, marital status, disability, or any other legally protected characteristic. Ascend hires and promotes individuals solely based on qualifications for the position to be filled and business needs.
