Short Department description, job purpose and role

This role within the Technology B2B2C unit is a great opportunity to lead a multi-disciplined engineering production support team (Java & Oracle). Reporting to the Head of IT Development, the key responsibilities of this position will be to work with all relevant local, regional and global stakeholders (both in Business and Technology) to manage and maximize reliability of the IT platforms used by us, and to ensure successful adherence to agreed SLAs. The IT Production Support Manager will be responsible for managing all IT Production Support teams (local and offshore) to ensure they are functioning in the most effective and efficient way.

Key responsibilities 

• Provide leadership and direction to the production support teams.
• Ensure talent management and staff development plans are in place to optimise the effectiveness of the individuals, and to maintain high levels of staff motivation.
• Adhere to standard IT Service Management practices (e.g. ITIL or similar).
• Manage resource allocations across Ireland and India to ensure full coverage at all times, including on call or out of hours if necessary.
• Monitor and regularly report to Head of IT Development on actuals vs. agreed SLA’s.
• Coordinate escalation and rapid resolution of major service issues.
• Ensure customer issues are priorities and resolved through triaging, troubleshooting and quickly applying solutions to any identified problems.

Further responsibilities

• Actively strive for continuous improvement in stability and reliability of our platforms.
• Provide support to the Business Analysts, Development and Testing teams, ensuring that projects delivered to Production are stable, supportable, and are not adding to technical debt.
• Responsibility for Health, Safety and Welfare within team (please refer to the Company’s Safety Statement for full list of responsibilities).

Key requirements /skills /experience

1. a) Qualification, Certification and Experiences (education, passed PE, trainings, certificates, special IT skills, languages etc.)

• Hold a third level degree or appropriate professional qualification.
• Minimum of 10 years of experience managing teams, and a minimum of 5 years managing multi-disciplined (Java & Oracle) IT production support teams.
• Experience of working in a client-driven environment, with a proven track record of managing live operational systems.
• Excellent team and people management skills, with proven experience in managing teams based locally and offshore.
• Proven track record of continuous improvement, innovation and creativity.
• Experience in managing multiple, diverse customers with competing demands.
• Thorough understanding and hands-on experience of all the major Software Development Life Cycles, including Waterfall and Agile methodologies.

1. b) Skills and Competencies (functional / technical / methodological / social skills, company  competencies)

• Strong Time Management, Communication (verbal & written), Commitment & Co-operation, Ownership & Accountability.
• Customer focused.

• Results driven and solution oriented – displays strong personal drive and energy to see things through to conclusion.
• Ability to work effectively on own and within a team environment  – including with distributed teams.

• Strong organisation and planning skills.
• Strong problem solving and analytical skills.
• Comfortable challenging the ideas of others
• High attention to detail & accuracy.
• Ability to prioritise competing workloads and manage time effectively.

Desired requirements /skills /experience

• Experience in the financial and insurance industries is desirable.

• Experience of working in an Agile environment, or Test Driven Development (TDD) is desirable.

• Good understanding of Oracle-based technologies (e.g. Oracle Forms, Oracle 11g/12c databases) would be beneficial, but not necessary.
• Good understanding of Unix based operating systems (Linux) would be beneficial, but not necessary.
• Good understanding of some of Java, JBoss, Websphere, Oracle ODI, IBM BPM, Angular, would be beneficial, but not necessary.