Global Data Manager

About Proforest

Proforest focuses on the production base and supply chains of agricultural and forestry commodities including soy, sugar, rubber, palm oil, cocoa, coconut, beef and timber. We have more than twenty years of practical experience in supporting companies, governments, communities and partners, to establish responsible production and sourcing practices in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe and North America.?? 

We support companies with direct action to tackle environmental and social risks throughout a supply chain. We also work with governments, companies, and collaborative?organisations, in order to address systemic issues beyond the supply chain, within a landscape or a sector, to deliver positive outcomes at scale.?We bring expertise in these environmental and social issues that drive our work, including protecting and restoring forests and natural ecosystems, conserving biodiversity, advancing gender equality and human rights. 

Data at Proforest

Proforest is increasingly working with data across the organisation on a global scale. Having supported the development of the Universal Palm Oil Mill List, we are increasingly working across larger data sets, across commodities, collecting, cleaning, managing and analysing data from multiple sources.

We collect or amalgamate data for our clients to report back on supply chain risks, gaps and levels of traceability. A growing number of companies are committing to report publicly on their commodity supply chains, and what they are doing to decouple the production and sourcing of commodities from environmental harm and human rights abuses. We support companies on setting KPIs, establishing the data and metrics required to report back on individual commitments and global goals. In our grant-funded work we collect qualitative and quantitative data to demonstrate impact within long-term programmes.

Working with our global teams, the Head of Data will be a strategic lead: supporting our technical work, bringing best practice and innovation to our data and visualisation, and focusing on what we need to do to deliver for clients and other key stakeholders.

Responsibilities

Data and Analytics vision and strategy

• Strategic role to enable project staff to deliver efficiently and effectively
• Alignment of all data across Proforest, internal and external, to ensure the right investment in new technologies or skills
• Manage the demands for new data services, including third party platforms and in-house development work with regions, project teams & programmes to understand data requirements
• Agree standardised data structures that fulfil client and programme team needs

Client consultancy

• Liaise with data leads in each region to agree project outputs with teams and clientsaround data collection, security, analyses and visualisation
• Translate an understanding of current and future clients needs for data management and visualisation into requirements and implementation
• Engage with client leads to ensure efficient delivery of data outputs and look for opportunities to create synergies with client data systems (and future plans around data)

Tech Stack

• Support the database migration from Heroku to Azure
• Manage development of data services or applications that can be developed on Azure
• Liaise with global IT to ensure alignment on governance and development on data collection, storage and security
• Own analytics and visualisation tools – e.g. Power BI, ArcGIS and Smartsheet

Team development and capacity building

• Oversee the data and visualisation global community of practice, a knowledge sharing group for anyone working with data that comes together monthly
• Line manage the database administrator
• Identify and support training requirements, including upskilling new staff to a base level in Excel and Power BI
• Support collaboration across regions, clients and programme teams

Job Requirements

These are the key elements you will need to demonstrate to be successful in this role:

-          Experience of data within responsible sourcing and production environment, including risk assessments, traceability data and sustainability reporting.

-          Hands-on understanding and ability to work with data, alongside the ability to take a strategic lead to future-proof our data strategy and services, work with global leadership team to guage needs across the organisation and provide consultancy input to project or programme work.

-          Successful track record of managing multiple data sets, establishing best practice (for people, platforms and processes) in the collection, cleaning, security, management and analysis of data.

-          Ability to lead change, including new technology platforms or applications, working with our IT and Technical Operations teams, as well as collaboration with non-technical data users

-          Fluency in English is important to work across all of our operating regions, while Indonesian Bahasa, Portuguese or Spanish, would be beneficial.

Skills and Experience

-          Strategic understanding of building a data practice in a global (distributed) organization.

-          Data governance, including client confidentiality and security, to ensure and promote a strong data culture.

-          Data analysis and modelling, to be able to turn client briefs into documented data requirements to provide the insights and intelligence needed, using common visualization and analyses tools.

-          Database management experience, ideally SQL (Heroku) and Azure, to manage a database migration and develop requirements for database development.

-          Strong Smartsheet, Excel, and Power BI skills. Some knowledge of programming language is advantageous (preferably Python).

-          Decentralized team coordination and networking (as this position will lead by example and will work with other Group colleagues).