Director of Digital Transformation

Principal Duties:

• Establish and maintain a vision for the MBTA’s Digital Transformation program that advances the MBTA’s interests. 
• Within 18 months, develop a stable pipeline and budget for a Digital Transformation building from seed funding and projects that have already been established.  
• Directly supervise project managers on Digital Transformation projects, including creating a team culture that is inclusive, transparent, and accountable. 
• Build strong relationships with leaders in other MBTA departments. These may be potential “customer” departments in need of digital services support (e.g., Subway Operations, Policy, Instruction, or Human Resources) or partner “delivery” departments who are also helping modernize the MBTA’s work (e.g., Lean Team, Information Technology, Office of Performance Management and Innovation).  
• Coordinate a cross-functional team of product managers, project/program managers, designers, and software engineers. These staff may not directly report to you but will look to you for guidance on adhering to the program’s vision and working successfully with MBTA stakeholders. 
• Coordinate capital (i.e., project) and operating (i.e., ongoing) budget resources to ensure Digital Transformation commitments are appropriately resourced and on track for success.  
• Manage requests for Digital Transformation support, including sourcing potential projects, applying project selection criteria, establishing clear written project scopes, resourcing new projects, and providing support to staff throughout a project’s lifecycle. 
• Familiarize yourself with the culture and policies of the MBTA so that you may help your staff and partners work effectively within this large, public-sector organization.  
• Manage strategic relationships with vendors that support Digital Transformation, in partnership with MBTA Procurement and Vendor Management staff.   
• Develop and maintain working relationships with public, private, academic, and other companies/institutions within the rapidly evolving transportation space.  
• Help MBTA partners determine the kinds of technologies and approaches that would help address their challenges.Assemble those skills/resources in project teams (e.g., in-house engineering work, off-the-shelf vendor applications, UX product design, different kinds of user research) 

Physical Demands and Working Conditions:

• This position can be partially remote, but will require office and field time within the MBTA system (offices, stations, stops, buses, trains, and garages). The timing of on-site time will vary: generally once a month is sufficient, but during key moments may require being on-site multiple times a week. Building relationships with internal stakeholders is a core responsibility of this position and it is expected that this will require significant on-site time due to the in-person nature of much of the MBTA’s core operational work. 
• The physical demands and work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable persons with disabilities to perform the essential functions. 

Work experience guidelines:

• Although we're mostly interested in your ability to do the work, here are some guidelines on the capabilities and experience we think might be most suited for this role. Please keep in mind that the experience guidelines are advisory, and not required. 


• Approximately 4 – 6 years working on technology change in the public sector or a large company (e.g., as a manager on a digital services team) 
• Approximately 2 years of experience managing personnel, either directly as a supervisor or indirectly as a project manager or similar role 
• Experience on an entrepreneurial team, whether a private sector company or an internal services team within a government (e.g., 18f in the U.S. federal government)  
• Demonstrated ability to develop and launch a public or private program, initiative, or venture   
• Effective organizational, analytical, time management, interpersonal and multi-tasking skills   
• Excellent customer service skills, with a proven ability to build trusted relationships with clients, internal business customers, or external customers (e.g., riders).  
• Excellent communication and presentation skills with ability to influence people at all levels of the organization, both vertically and horizontally, as well as outside the organization 
• Experience using modern collaboration technologies for task management (we use Asana), document collaboration (we use Office 365), whiteboarding (we use Miro), and team chat (we use Slackand alsoMicrosoft Teams in limited circumstances).  

Minimum Education:

• Formal education in Transportation Planning, Computer Science, Engineering, Economics, Urban Planning, Data Science, Public Administration, or a related field. (This could be a college degree, a bootcamp, a certificate program, or something else entirely.)