Description:
The Core Systems Optimisation team, (CSOT), is responsible for the delivery of, and ongoing enhancement to the University’s Core Systems which underpin the activities of the University. The effective operation of these systems supports the University’s ambitious plans to grow income, control costs, enhance efficiency and digitise transactional processing as part of improvements in key performance indicators and industry benchmarking.
Reporting to the Service Deliver Manager, the post holder will be responsible for managing the entire core systems release cycles and environments. This includes planning, testing, monitoring, and reporting. They will also be responsible for managing production and non-production environments to ensure that the integrity of the environments is protected.
Main duties
Release and Deployment Management
- Leading the release delivery plan, identifying key dependencies and risks.
- Forward planning the release windows and cycles.
- Maintaining the release schedules for our services and ensuring alignment across all internal and external teams involved in these releases.
- Managing the Quarterly Release, Monthly and Weekly patch process, including:
- Release Readiness notes reviewed and cascaded
- Preparing Impact Assessment documentation, identifying what mandatory changes will be introduced
- Engaging with the functional areas to agree any discretionary functionality to be implemented in the quarterly release.
- Managing release testing activities, ensuring that defects are logged and resolved.
- Communicating to stakeholders the changes introduced through the quarterly releases.
- Conducting kick-off meetings and lessons learned sessions, and ensuring processes and documentations are updated.
- Keeping up-to-date with release resources and cascading as required.
- Understanding the nature of release defects and their root-cause, ensuring that robust fixes are deployed as quickly as possible.
- Identifying and advising the University on business process improvements that can be made in the functional area.
- Communicating release details and schedules to the stakeholders as required
- Continually work towards making improvements in the release process
- Managing testing process including the team’s use of test management tools and test automation tools to minimise the manual effort involved in regression testing.
- Ensuring the root cause of release issues are understood and mitigated to prevent its re-occurrence and the resolution is identified and implemented.
Environment Management
- Ensuring environments are maintained and fit for purpose
- Ensuring consistency in configurations between environments, config changes are documented and maintained
- Ensuring adherence to governance process, policies, and procedures
- Ensuring the root cause of environment issues are understood and mitigated to prevent its re-occurrence and the resolution is identified and implemented.
Configuration Management
- Maintain the list of all environments, the version of the releases and the version of the data on each of the environments
- Perform operational activities as defined by Configuration Management policies and procedures
- Perform Configuration Management Requests as assigned, including CMDB updates
Release Testing Support
- Planning and supporting the release testing cycles
- Ensuring compliance with relevant procedures and processes, and maintaining test evidence/audit trail as required
- Maintaining the regression testing suite and ensuring test suites are updated or archived as required
Stakeholder Management
- Building trust and credibility with stakeholders
- Maintaining open communication
- Identifying and managing potential risks associated to the stakeholders
Required Knowledge, Skills, Qualifications, Experience
Qualifications:
- Relevant Oracle Certification
- Significant change and release management experience
- Understanding of ITIL and best practice processes around Release Management