Senior Manager/Director - Business Operations & Governance

Kriyadocs; Chennai District; On-site; INR 4,000,000 - 7,000,000; Full time

Job summary

Kriyadocs, a publishing technology company, seeks a Senior Manager/Director of Business Operations & Governance in Chennai. The role leads governance, ISO compliance, and enterprise-wide reporting, driving AI-enabled operational excellence.

You will own multi-function cadence, ensure commitments close, and raise performance across the executive team. Partner with the CEO and functional heads, shaping the transformation plan and reporting framework to sustain business growth and governance

Qualifications

• Ten to fourteen years of experience in senior governance or operations roles.
• Experience holding senior people to account with verifiable examples.
• Board or executive-level reporting experience with numbers defended.
• Systems thinking and cross-functional collaboration across Engineering, Publishing Services, Finance, HR and Commercial teams.
• Applied AI and technology experience that improves operational effectiveness.

Responsibilities

• Own the ISO framework and ensure ongoing compliance across the organisation.
• Lead leadership cadence, record decisions with owners and due dates.
• Coordinate with executive team to close commitments and manage risks.
• Develop and maintain enterprise dashboards, KPIs and risk registers.
• Serve as the connective tissue between multiple functions to align priorities.

Skills

Systems thinking

Governance

Executive stakeholder management

Programme management

AI / Automation

Microsoft 365 / Teams

Board reporting

Risk management

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

Microsoft Teams

Power BI

Jira

Job description

Senior Manager/Director - Business Operations & Governance

10 - 15 Years

Full-Time

About Kriyadocs

Kriyadocs is a publishing technology company that helps publishers produce and deliver high-quality content faster through an intelligent, automated production platform. As the Engineering function scales, the organisation needs stronger cross-project coordination, delivery governance and reporting discipline across concurrent tracks.

The Role

Kriyadocs is a publishing technology company enabling publishers to produce and deliver high-quality content through an intelligent, AI-powered publishing platform. We have partnered with leading publishing houses worldwide for over eighteen years, and we are ISO 27001 certified. We have spent considerable time charting our transformation plan. What we need now is someone who can hold us to it.

This role owns the operating discipline through which the company executes. Transformation plans rarely fail on the thinking — they fail because decisions taken in a leadership meeting never turn into anything happening afterwards. Closing that gap is the job. The role works directly with the Chief Executive Officer and is expected to hold the executive team to what it has committed to — functional heads and any member of the executive team, without exception. It carries two further ownerships: our ISO framework and process compliance, and the systems and technology the company runs on.

Holding people senior to you to their commitments is the central challenge here, and the reason the role sits at this level. It therefore carries an explicit and publicly stated mandate from the Chief Executive Officer — the appointment will be announced on that basis, the mandate stated to the executive team directly, and you will be backed the first time it is tested. The role reports to the CEO with standing access.

We are looking for a systems thinker — someone who sees the organisation as a set of connected processes, builds the frameworks that make it run, and identifies where a failure actually sits rather than where it surfaces. It also requires an independent, organisation-wide view: governance conducted on the basis of what each function chooses to report is of little value. And we want someone genuinely fluent with technology and unafraid of it. AI is central to how we intend to operate, not an afterthought, and this role is expected to lead on applying it to how the business itself runs.

2. What You Will Own

2.1 Building the systems and frameworks

• The frameworks that translate transformation goals into defined, sequenced workstreams — each stage building on the last, with milestones and dates granular enough for teams to act on without further interpretation.
• The cadence framework itself: which forums exist, at what frequency, with what inputs, producing what outputs — and the infrastructure beneath it, including Microsoft Teams channel structure by workstream and where commitments, roadmap and risk documentation live.
• The map of inter-functional dependencies, and the mechanism by which blockers surface before delivery is affected rather than once it already has been.
• The business dashboards, metrics and KPIs — a single authoritative source rather than competing versions. Designed for decisions, not presentation: a dashboard that changes nobody’s decision is not finished.
• The OKR process across functions, and the enterprise risk register — each material risk carrying an owner, a documented mitigation and a review date.
• The mental models and execution frameworks that convert ideas into action, embedded across functions until teams apply them unprompted.

2.2 Owning the cadence and the accountability

• Run the leadership cadence. Record every decision and commitment with a named owner and a due date. Nothing verbal, nothing ambiguous.
• Hold the executive team accountable for what it has committed to. Active follow-up with the accountable individual — functional heads and any member of the executive team, without exception — not the reporting of overdue status.
• Resolve directly wherever it can be resolved and escape deliberately when it cannot. Closure is verified, not asserted.
• Keep the roadmap reflecting reality rather than intention, and report slippage when it becomes apparent rather than at the deadline. Pursue ageing risks and unmet OKRs on the same basis as any other commitment.
• Act as the connective tissue between Engineering, Publishing Services, Finance, HR and the commercial functions — work spanning two or more gets a named owner and does not stall in the space between. Surface conflicting priorities to the CEO with a recommendation, rather than letting them resolve by whoever pushes hardest.
• you own the cadence; functional leaders own the content. Prioritisation, technical decisions and delivery are theirs. You make commitments visible and ensure they close — you do not decide what matters.

2.3 ISO, process and compliance

• Own the ISO framework. Documentation, internal review, control evidence, surveillance audit readiness and continual improvement — treated as a live system rather than an annual event.
• Ensure processes are documented, current and observed in practice rather than only on paper — and enforce them where they are not. This is the part of the role that requires spine.
• Own the statutory and regulatory compliance calendar, coordinating across Finance, HR and our external legal, audit and compliance advisers — driving closure of actions while the specialist work stays with them.
• Act as our point of coordination with external counsel and auditors: briefing them properly, chasing what we owe them, and making sure their advice results in something changing here.
• Hold operating standards and best practice across functions, and be prepared to tell a functional head when their function is not meeting them.

2.4 Board and executive reporting

• Prepare the board pack — assembling material from across functions into coherent, concise papers, to a standard suitable for a board and its external director.
• Own the integrity of what is presented. Figures reconcile across functions and are traceable to source. Where the picture is unfavourable, it is presented as it is.
• Own the board calendar and the flow of contributions from functional heads, so material is complete and circulated with time to be read. Produce one-page decision papers for the CEO — decision required, options, recommendation — and track board actions to closure.

2.5 Technology and AI

• Lead initiatives to improve how the organisation uses its tooling. The first is a programme to establish how Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 are used company-wide — as a working operating system rather than file storage and chat.
• Evaluate, select and drive adoption of new software where it would materially improve how we operate — business case through to adoption, not procurement.
• Own how AI is applied to the running of the business. Identify where it can remove manual effort in operations, reporting, coordination and compliance, then implement it and build it into how we work rather than piloting it. Bring a view on where technology genuinely helps and where it does not — we would rather have judgement than enthusiasm.

3. Experience

• Ten to fourteen years, including substantial time in a role requiring the pursuit of commitments and closure from senior stakeholders — executives, functional heads or clients.
• Demonstrated experience holding senior people to account, with specific instances you can speak to.
• Business- or customer-facing experience where a missed commitment carried real consequence — an escalation, a lost opportunity, a damaged relationship. This matters more to us than industry background or purely internal reporting experience.
• Board or executive-committee material prepared, with the numbers defended.
• Systems thinking — seeing the organisation as connected processes, identifying where a failure actually sits rather than where it surfaces, and designing a fix that holds.

4. Skills and Tools

• Programme management. Microsoft Project, Smartsheet, Jira, Asana, Monday.com or comparable, including configuration rather than use alone. Gantt charts, critical path analysis, dependency mapping, milestone and phase planning.
• Microsoft 365 and Teams used as a working governance system rather than document storage.
• OKR and KPI frameworks — how they are set, cascaded, measured and reviewed in a working cadence rather than presented once a quarter.
• Data and reporting. Advanced Excel; Power BI, Tableau or equivalent. Board-standard presentation material and precise written English.
• Applied AI and technology. Comfortable with technology and unafraid of it. Demonstrated use of AI to improve operational effectiveness — meeting summarisation, action tracking, drafting, risk identification. Demonstrated adoption rather than awareness. Experience running a software selection end to end.

5. Certifications

• ISO 27001 Lead Auditor or Lead Implementer — the most directly applicable certification for this role. We are ISO 27001 certified and this position owns the framework.
• PMP or PRINCE2 Practitioner — structured programme and governance discipline.
• Lean Six Sigma, Green or Black Belt — applied process improvement.
• Also advantageous: ISO 9001 Internal Auditor, Prosci change management, Microsoft PL-300 (Power BI), Microsoft 365 / Teams administration, PgMP, COBIT or ITIL.

Certifications evidence training rather than capability, and we weight applied experience considerably more heavily than the credential itself.

6. First 90 Days

• A working governance cadence is operating, with all commitments recorded, assigned and dated.
• Transformation goals are translated into sequenced workstreams with documented inter-functional dependencies.
• The roadmap is current and accurate with slippage visible, and a live risk register is in operation with owners, mitigations and review dates — reviewed rather than filed.
• Leadership has a single, reliable view of open items, ownership and ageing, and commitments lapsing between forums have measurably reduced.
• One board pack has been produced to a standard the CEO is comfortable presenting.

7. Level, Title and Logistics

Offered at Senior Manager or Director level — the level and title will be set by the successful candidate’s experience rather than fixed in advance. Chennai, onsite, full-time. No direct reports initially; a small team may follow as the function establishes itself. A bachelor’s degree is required.