Publishing Operations Manager

Reports to (title): Head of Cochrane Library

Department: Publishing and Technology Directorate

Date: September 2022

PRINCIPAL ACCOUNTABILITIES/KEY RESULT AREAS

Manage publishing systems

• Act as a key liaison point between the editorial management system, production systems, and other publishing technology suppliers and business teams, ensuring a clear understanding of Cochrane’s needs and objectives.
• Ongoing management of external publishing technology system vendors, including reviewing processes and performance, implementing changes, providing technical guidance and supporting the creation of documentation.
• Manage vendor performance and oversee quality control; manage vendor dashboards and report on performance against service-level agreements.
• Analyse and resolve complex technical problems and roadblocks around data and systems access.

Refine and improve processes and systems

• Understand operational workflows and systems architecture, identify and define systems needs to enable operational scaling, and drive the development and deployment of these systems.
• Identify and implement any production and operation processes, workflows or systems improvements that would lead to increased reliability and efficiency.
• Identify upcoming developments on the vendors’ product roadmaps that would be of benefit to Cochrane and oversee their rollout.
• Work closely with the Cochrane Support team, specifically the IT Systems Support Specialist, to design and propose processes and systems that contribute to editorial efficiency and meet user needs effectively.

Support product innovation

• Identify and analyse systems dependencies for innovations on the Cochrane Library product roadmap and liaise with publishing technology teams to ensure any development is completed on time and on scope.

Stakeholder management

• Facilitate collaborative decision-making and manage prioritisation processes
• Manage stakeholder expectations and communicate with internal teams and external partners to provide technical and business feedback, as well as deliver technical solutions.
• Create and maintain feedback loop between stakeholders and users, and apply a data-informed approach to refine and improve processes and systems

PERSON SPECIFICATION

Essential

• Experience managing contracts and service-level agreements (SLAs) with external vendors.
• Experience of peer review and production systems within scientific/society publishing.
• Experience of overseeing feature/functionality requests and change requests with external vendors.
• Strong organisation skills and ability to manage multiple projects.
• Theoretical and practical experience of change management.
• An understanding of how technology is affecting innovation within STM journal production and operations.
• Excellent communication skills.

Desirable

• Experience of working with Editorial Manager (Aries).
• Experience of working with JATs / XML.
• Experience of product development methodologies (Scaled Agile Framework, Scrum)

KEY INTERFACES

• Internal: Product Team; Content Production and Policies; Information Technology; Cochrane Support Team.
• External: Publishing Partner; Editorial Management Systems Vendor; Production Systems
  Vendor

DIMENSIONS

• Budgetary responsibility: Editorial management systems
• Number of direct and indirect reports:  None