Application Support Manager

Role: Application Support Manager

Reports to: Operations Director

Direct Reports: Lead Applications Support Analyst, Applications support Analyst, Apprentice Applications Support Analyst.

Purpose of Role: Manage a team of Application Support Team Members to deliver great customer service to our customers. Owner of the Incident, Request, Change and Escalation processes, ensuring high levels of performance in these areas, establishing customer service improvement activities to increase customer satisfaction and business efficiencies.

Key Responsibilities

Tickets and Incident Management

• Overall ownership of the ticket system through KPI’s administration – process, measurement, improvement.
• Overall management of customer and ticket level SLAs.
• Categorisation of tickets, tracking and provision of dashboard business reporting, provide full visibility of status within a single system.
• Prioritise issues based on business impact and be able to justify those priorities to the leadership team.
• Provide regular and accurate management reporting on software support performance (MS Dynamics, SLAs’ etc).
• Communicate incident timescales, progress and outcomes to relevant internal stakeholders, customers and agents.
• Be an ambassador for service levels working across the business to provide effective communication on software matters and build relationships with other teams to ensure effective dialogue between departments.
• Have a broad technical knowledge of LineView product offering and be comfortable reviewing bugs, incidents, identifying patterns which lead to improvements.
• Undertake system configuration fixes where necessary.
• Suggest and implement process improvements that make the way that incidents are managed more efficient and transparent.
• Proactively identify recurring and potential incidents and take responsibility for their solutions
• Fix application and system problems, or any incident that is disrupting the application service that business users depend on.
• Work with the QA, Development, Implementation and Project teams on a daily basis to contribute to the overall LineView improvement strategy.
• Take ownership of major incidents to ensuring coordination of resolving parties, effective communication to stakeholders and post incident review.
• Monitor, control and support service delivery; ensuring systems, methodologies and procedures are in place and followed.

Project Support

• Champion Service and Support in projects and developing a strong understanding of projects impacting your service area and ensuring service impact is minimised and agreed.
• Support customer account manager at customer meetings.
• Priorirtise ticket response to meet new line invoiced deadlines.
• Prioritise work to deliver successful pilots.

Release Deployment

• Ensure that releases, patching updates are carried out promptly and deployed effectively.
• Plan and execute version releases to site liaising closely with the Product Owners and account management and internal stakeholders to meet customer SLA.
• Work with the QA, Development, Implementation and Project teams on a daily basis to contribute to the overall LineView improvement strategy.
• Carry out UAT testing as instructed by QA.

Hardware Set-Up and Support

• Ensure hardware is set up correctly pre project to meet delivery deadlines for both virtual and physical hardware.
• Fixing and hardware troubleshooting to resolve issues.

Line & Department Management

• People management responsibility for the department and ensure compliance to 1-1s, mid year and annual reviews, holidays, setting objectives and OKRS, adhering to relevant standards and performing the relevant tasks according to the role.
• Provide coaching to the team when required.
• Identifying team development requirements and managing skill and career development plans
• Delegating and assigning relevant projects and tasks to the team members to ensure successful accomplishment.
• Set up and manage the relevant structure of meetings and routines to ensure team members are clear on priorities and delivery of those against individual and departmental KPIs.
• Reporting on department level KPIs to the business.
• Ensure relevant SOPs and procedures are in place for the team and adherence to these.
• Work closely with the other department heads and be part of the management team for the service delivery department.

Knowledge, Skills and Experience:

• A background in providing technical support and resolving customer queries, in line with service levels.
• Previously worked with an ITSM System.
• Able to work within a team or using own initiative, taking responsibility for incidents / problems until resolved.
• Understanding of ITIL Framework.
• Strong planning, organisational and communication skills with the ability to adapt style and language depending on the audience (technical and non-technical).
• Strong customer service skills with the ability to communicate with external customers, take ownership of issues and provide appropriate updates, feedback and information throughout the problem / incident life cycle.
• Be comfortable dealing with changing customer and business priorities.
• Experience of server based database environments, including reporting such as SQL and Mongo and be comfortable reviewing logs and identifying patterns which lead to support issues.
• Some technical knowledge, ideally with web applications, API’s and databases.
• Cloud operation support for MS considerations (things like certificate upgrades, security patches etc).
• Strong investigation / troubleshooting skills, with the ability to solve or suggest solutions to resolve issues.
• Able to work under your own direction and engage people across the business for information as required in order to achieve a successful resolution.
• Able to work under general direction within a clear framework of accountability.
• Comfortable performing a wide range of complex technical or professional work activities, in a variety of contexts.
• Able to quickly absorb new technical information and apply it effectively.
• Be able to document issues and resolutions to be shared in a knowledge base for internal and external agents.
• Experience of undertaking systems analysis, identifying process improvements.
• Excellent PC skills, familiar with most MS Office products. Comfortable to use unfamiliar software packages with no / minimal training.

Preferred (Not Essential) Knowledge, Skills and Experience

• 5-7 years of related experience, preferably with software applications in a manufacturing environment.
• Understanding of remote access software and technologies, eg VPN client software.
• Networking hardware, software, protocols & technologies including both wired and wireless.
• Knowledge of production line monitoring and metrics including OEE and 6 Sigma.