Senior Specialist, Release & Deployment at A Renowned Company

A renowned company in the financial services industry specialized in the use of technology for revenue collection and management requires the
service of the following personnel who must be highly skilled and experienced.

Job Objectives

• Ensure that proposed changes are controlled, monitored, and implemented with minimum disruption to the services being delivered
• Accountable for confirming service readiness
• Accountable for ensuring that new or changed services satisfy all readiness criteria and are supplied ready for live deployment
• Ensure up-front planning, scheduling, and successfully deploying releases to production environment in a controlled and systematic way so as to meet service levels and avoid any impacts on existing services

Reports To:

Head of Department, Solution Delivery
(Administrative reporting)

Job Responsibilities
Department: Solution Delivery Supervises:
Key Performance Indicators

Competence Requirements

• Ensure appropriate operational service documentation is created &
• accepted by stakeholders prior to the introduction of a new service
• Develop service readiness & risk plan & ensure that transition risks are identified and mitigated
• Plan appropriate capacity and resources to release a new product, feature or service to the production environment
• Arrange and lead the go-live authorization discussions with other work streams
• Authorize and conduct service handover
• Ensure that proposed changes are controlled, monitored, and implemented with minimum disruption to the services being delivered
• Accountable for ensuring that new or changed services satisfy all readiness criteria and are supplied ready for live deployment
• Ensure up-front planning, scheduling, and successfully deploying releases to production environment in a controlled and systematic
• way so as to meet service levels and avoid any impacts on existing services
• Consistent and comprehensive release schedule in place for all new/changed services
• All required release documentation logged and maintained in a configuration management database/ system
• Incidents or minutes of downtime related to new services introduced
• # of services going live with
• "Red" risks
• #  of changes delivered on time
• # of failed changes (number of changes causing an incident)
• # of unsuccessful changes (changes that failed in deployment)
• Good understanding of release management and service readiness; service operations, solution development
• Strong understanding of IT services & ability to understand operational readiness of services
• Communication skills
• Awareness of the impact of changes
• Understanding of and experience using change management tools
• Good awareness of commercial commitments and liabilities
• Strong understanding of IT services, service readiness and the required deliverables / outcomes
• Planning & organizing skills
• Excellent co-ordination skills
• Strong oral and written communication & facilitation skills
• English
• Ensure operability criteria are built into the specifications for new services from the outset
• Planning, preparing and executing service validation tests according to the project plan
• Plan and oversee the successful roll-out of IT service changes into the “live” environment
• Define the release and deployment plans with all stakeholders
• Ensure that all release and deployment packages can be tracked, installed, tested, verified and backed out (if required)
• Ensure that release schedule & all required documentation related to the release are documented
• Review major change requests
• Approve major change requests and / or ensure all changes have been signed off by all relevant teams
• Co-ordinate the implementation of change requests
• Ensure processes are in place for communication of changes
• Ensure that all changes have been signed off by all relevant teams

Specification/Qualification

Educational Qualification
Minimum of a Higher National Diploma (HND) in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or related areas

Professional Qualification 
Possession of the following certification is recommended: CBAP, MCSD, CSD, CSQA

Desired Experience
7 to 10 years of functional experience