Applications and Data Manager - STRAP DV Cleared

JOB DESCRIPTION

Vetting Level

Developed Vetting (DV) and Management Vetting (MV) = DV(Enhanced)

STRAP Required

Yes - TS/TK STRAP

Job Summary

The CTP Customer Service Centre (CSC) is located close to Birmingham Airport and the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) and provides IT support nationwide; to policing as well as other partner agencies, on a 24/7 basis. As a proven centre of excellence, aligned to ITIL best practices, the Application and Data functions have been developed and invested in heavily over the last few years. Now, due to a promotion, the department seeks to recruit a new Applications and Data Teams Manager.

As Applications and Data Teams Manager you will be supporting a catalogue of national application services that are mission critical to Counter Terrorism Policing. You will be responsible for line managing a diverse teams of Application Analysts, Engineers and SQL DBA's working on a variety of incidents, problems, changes, releases and patches. You will be performing regular 121's and setting work prioritisation with our teams, both in Birmingham and London.

The role will require you from time to time to get technically hands on, so someone coming from a technical background is ideal. As is someone who has a demonstrable experience of line managing diverse groups of practitioners.

The role holder will be required to engage with a wide array of stakeholders, representing Applications and Data in engagements with suppliers, and business groups across the organisation. You will also be involved in projects, helping to ensure the smooth transition of new services from project to business as usual (BAU) support.

This role requires a flexible working approach and may be required to travel to sites around the UK as appropriate.

Key Tasks

The post holder will be required to do the following:

• Provide line management, mentorship and leadership to the Applications and Data Teams based at the CSC and CTOC
• Ensure that BAU workloads are actively managed and prioritized in accordance to agreed service levels and ITIL best practice
• Represent the Applications and Data Teams at meetings, working groups, supplier reviews, project boards etc.
• Liaise with stakeholders from across the business and be able to relay technical solutions with clarity and minimal jargon to a diverse audience
• Represent the function on the CSC Senior Management Team (SMT) and join the Management On Call roster to provide an out of hours escalation point to the business for service issues
• Regularly liaise with the other managers of the CSC SMT, ensuring that the teams are collaborating and working efficiently and effectively in providing an end to end support service with other support functions
• Act as a point of contact and subject matter expert at the change advisory board and other governance exchanges to ensure conformity and oversight of technical work that may adversely affect or impact supported applications
• Devise critical success factors, key performance indicators and other suitable metrics for the department and produce useful reports for stakeholders to demonstrate the output, performance and value of the function
• Provide application expertise and advice to both BAU functions and Projects to ensure objectives are being met in line with National CT priorities
• Working in conjunction with key stakeholders to create and continually maintain a comprehensive documentation set to ensure the department can adequately support BAU services in a consistent manner
• Assist with resilience and failover testing to ensure that all CSC managed infrastructure applications are tested and documented on a regular basis to ensure failover functions as designed and is predicable
• Proactively monitor Application tools to ensure availability, capacity and performance is acceptable and raise any related concerns to senior management as appropriate
• Ensure Change and Release management process and procedures are adhered to and correct process is followed to mitigate against unplanned downtime and service outages
• Ensure CSC Infrastructure standards are followed to ensure new and existing services implemented in a standard nature and scalable in approach
• Ensure security accreditation and procedure is not compromised by ensuring all activities comply with relevant SyOPs and RMADS

Essential Experience

• Experience in roles involving service management of high priority digital or technology services in a demanding operational environment;
• Experience of building and maintaining relationships with a range of business users and senior stakeholders in the context of service management of live IT services.
• Experience in roles managing commercial or internal suppliers and their performance against agreed contract requirements or Service Level Agreements;
• Excellent oral and written communication skills to ensure all stakeholders associated with the service maintain a clear understanding of the status of the service and associated tasks at all times.
• Experience working within a service based team monitoring components such as web servers, applications servers, log files, disk space and databases
• Experience of line management and leadership
• Solid understanding of the entire Application Lifecycle
• Experience of testing bug fixes and enhancements and involvement with release management
• Experience of raising support tickets and coordinating vendor support
• Understanding of ITIL process, incident management, change management and problem management including working to strict SLAs
• Experience of performing application upgrades, patches and failovers
• Experience of maintaining middleware, application hosting technologies and architecture, MS SQL, MySQL and other common database technologies, Active Directory, ASP and.NET including troubleshooting, performance tuning, basic queries and resolving bottlenecks)
• Knowledge of reporting and integration using query writing, power shell, java, JavaScript, HTML and SQL
• Experience of Linux operating systems, including shell script.
• Knowledge of Application firewalls and system component communication
• Experience of managing application backups and restores
• Experience of supporting COTS and WEB based software applications
• Ability to understand business logic, technical tools and be an analytic thinker
• Strong customer focus - understanding the needs of the internal and external customer and keeping them in mind when taking actions or making decisions
• Strong communication and interpersonal skills with an aptitude for communication complex technical issues to both peers and non-technical staff

Desirable

• An appreciation of the below (or similar):
• Kubernetes and containerisation tooling (e.g. SUSE Rancher, RKE2, EKS, AKS, Yaml, Helm, Docker)
• .NET (C#, ASP.NET, .NET CORE)
• JavaScript (REACT, Bootstrap Frameworks, node.js)
• Databases (SQL)
• NoSQL technologies e.g. Elasticsearch

• Knowledge of ITIL framework (preferably ITIL4 foundation qualified) and experience of applying and undertaking ITIL based service management activities including change management and incident management, acting as the main point of contact for senior stakeholders during major incidents
• Experience of Agile ways of working (SAFE Agile)
• Preferred experience within a secure police, defence or public sector environment