Senior Application Support Manager

RS Group•Richland Hills, TX

About The Position

As Senior Application Support Manager you will deputise for the Head of Application and assist in managing the Global Application Support Team. This will facilitate a partial “follow the sun” model where the UK and USA team will handoff inflight issues which need to be tracked outside of local working hours. The Global Application support team is responsible for the managing the application and data base support for front office and other ancillary systems globally. This role will primarily focus on our US based divisions but also to provide “follow the sun” coverage for EMEA and APAC. This includes oversight and acceptance into production of application developments, off the shelf and SAAS based application, disaster recovery planning and testing, maintenance, monitoring and resolution of IT incidents and requests across those group third party applications managed within the IT Support and Operations function.

Requirements

Clear Understanding on ITIL principles and Processes
Experience supporting group applications and group teams.
Solid understanding of Incident, Problem, Change and Release management processes.
Management of budgets in excessive of £1M and experience of managing to budget and evidence of driving successful cost savings initiatives.
Extensive experience of defining application support models across a variety of solutions such as SaaS and on-premise and cloud hosted applications.
Ability to maintain clear and focused thinking under stressful/high pressure situations.
Experience of managing in-house and outsourced support teams.
Ability to translate technical information into business terminology to ensure the business are clear on the technical impact of any application issues to their operations.
Stakeholder management across all levels within our organisation.
Excellent vendor management capabilities including extensive experience of deploying and managing suppliers to a formal supplier relationship management model. This includes the ability to define and manage suppliers to contractual obligations and SLAs.
Strong verbal, written communication skills.
Strong decision-making skills especially under high pressure situations such as incidents.
Extensive experience of managing the lifecycle of an application.
ITIL Foundation

Nice To Haves

ITIL Practitioner
Working knowledge of project Management lifecycle and methodologies (e.g. Prince 2, PMM, Lean, Agile, Waterfall etc.)

Responsibilities

Deputise for Head of Applications as required
Direct line management of US based Application support Team
Delivery of application support services such as (but not limited to) monitoring, maintenance, incident and problem resolution for our group applications.
Proactively drive clarity on strategy, design, architecture within RS Americas for new systems as required
Working with the other RS Teams, assist in ensuring there is clarity of ownership for all systems and solutions within RS Group.
Manage resolution of major incidents, ensure follow up root cause analysis is completed including any preventative actions.
Ensuring application performance and availability service Levels are met and identify ways to continually improve availability.
Reporting availability and performance against service levels to the stakeholders on a regular basis.
Accountable for oversight of DR plan and testing globally. Ensuring our annual DR tests with all our third parties and IS&T teams are carried out. With objective of ensuring we have sufficient DR plans for our critical platforms.
Define, review and accept support model for new applications and upgrades into production, ensuring that all elements required to support are in place and any risks or issues prior to go-live are managed and accepted with the stakeholders as part of the go-live criteria.
Attending Change Advisory Board (CAB) meetings as required and assessing requests for change for their impact on availability.
Accountable for the lifecycle management of applications supported by IT Support and Operations function working with the other teams to gain input and acceptance to the lifecycle plan and raising any lifecycle issues in a timely manner with the business owners.
Maintaining application non-functional requirements which projects need to adhere to.
Assist with budget management of the operating costs for application services including being accountable for the monthly and annual forecasting of these budgets.
Prioritising the initiatives which will be funded by the Keep the Lights on budget.
Accountability for the delivery of the agreed application initiatives prioritised within the Keep the Lights on budget.
Management of the application configuration data and information.
Working with project teams to ensure configuration data is captured, documented and managed correctly when introducing new services.
Ensure on-going maintenance of the Configuration Management Database working with the application and other support teams and suppliers, to update interfaces and dependencies that exist between IT services, components, supporting services, and configuration items (CIs) across the applications supported by the IT Support and Operations function.
Agreeing and maintaining a clear set of application categories with the business which define the criticality of each application including disaster recovery requirements, availability, performance and support hours based on the agreed criticality category such as mission critical, important etc,
Defining and maintaining the tools and tool strategy needed to support our applications such as monitoring tools.
Management of availability and relevant security and other vulnerability patching planning and requirements for the applications.
Manage the renewal of contracts with suppliers for applications.
Ensuring that the demand process is followed to allocate resources needed to deliver the agreed initiatives prioritised within the Keep the Lights and Strategic portfolios.
Relationship management across all the teams within IS&T, HR, Finance and our key business functions who own and use the applications supported by the IT Support and Operations function.