Team Leader — Water Operations Expert

The team leader position is for an institutional support project in Georgia, the input would be starting as soon as the designated TL is available and accepted (Oct/Nov 2014).  Project Description The United Water Supply Company of Georgia (UWSCG) is one of three water and wastewater utilities servicing about 58.5% population in Georgia. The other two companies service Tbilisi and the Adjara region. UWSCG  was  established  in  January  2010  and  has three organizational tiers: a central office located in Tbilisi, six regional branches, and 53 service centres covering cities and towns. At present UWSCG manages the 53 service centres with 2,343 staff  and has recently begun reforms and many functions have been centralized, notably planning, design, finance,  logistics  and  procurement. Central  offices  in  Tbilisi  are  manned  with  150 technical  and  administrative  staff  to  manage  many  of  these  diverse  functions. Currently, there are 6 regional offices that link Tbilisi with the service centres. The regional offices provide troubleshooting technical assistance to the service centres. The service centres are responsible for the day to day operation and maintenance (O&M) for water supply and sewerage services. System  operation  and  services  are  challenged  by  aging  infrastructure,  irregular maintenance and low capacity. In many service centres systems exceed 30-50 years of use  with  historically  low  investments  in  asset  management  and  maintenance  and require significant investment to improve efficiency and quality of services. With  the  corporatization  and  reorganization  UWSCG,  had  been  implementing structured  programs  of  both  improving  the  infrastructure  capacity  and  organisation efficiency. The company has invested in management improvements like setting up a new centralized billing system, a customer service centre at Kutaisi (one of the service area with large customer base), transport facilities, operational tools and equipment, spares, inventory etc. In addition to these, the company had been undertaking focused improvements  in  customer  metering,  collection  of  revenue  and  achieved  significant increase both in collection as well as billed volume which is reflected in the following financial summary.  Objectives / Scope of services: The role of the Management Contractor (MC) is to provide management support services to the Client for improving the water services in the service area in its jurisdiction, aiming at: a) Improving water services to customers b) Capacitate UWSCG to become an efficient and effective water utility services company c) Improved technical and commercial efficiency in operations d) Increased productivity of UWSCG employees e) Moving towards full cost recovery and financial turn-around f) Achieving sustainability in the long term. The Management Contractor (MC) provides qualified and experienced functional specialists who assist the Client in improving the performance in the following key areas: a) Water production, transport and distribution operational services b) Commercial services including billing, income collection c) Customer services including recording and resolving customer complaints d) Institutional re-engineering, change management, internal accountability mechanisms and organizational effectiveness e) Financial management, accounts, revenue and expenditure management f) Information management, analysis and control; setting up an Enterprise Resource Planning system g) Human resources management, instituting rewards, incentives and performance appraisal systems Requirements for the Team Leader — Water Operations Expert Shall be a graduate engineer at least 20 years of experience out of which at least l0 years shall be as an operational manager of a water utility providing services to at least 300,000 connections having demonstrated experience in improving the operating efficiency of water services in developing countries. Team leader experience in capacity development / institutional strengthening projects. Further requirements: good team leading skills successful experience in performance based projects results-oriented approach practice in coordinating projects with many different Areas of Intervention practice in communicating with Clients in Russian/Soviet mindsets Input The Project is already running since End of July 2013. The project would still be running until 06/2016 The remaining input for the TL is ~10 person-months (if beginning 1st Oct 2014), of these around 9.5 would be on site with more Input in the beginning and then more intermittent Input later during the project. This results in an intermittent input of the team leader, especially towards the end of the project. Interested candidates fulfilling the above requirements (especially the 10 yrs as operational manager providing services to at least 300,000 connections) should send a CV in EU format as soon as possible to Winfried.ksoll@sachsenwasser.com. Availability: TL candidate should be available starting in October 2014 – latest early November.