Lead Operations

**Job Purpose**:
**Principal Accountabilities**:

- Provide input to the design of the Department Strategy and implement strategy within area/s of responsibility
- Recommends and standardises policies, processes and systems to support implementation of the strategy
- Drive profitability in area of responsibility and overall department
- Manage and control budget in area of responsibility and contribute to department budget management
- Provide recommendations to actively support cost and headcount containment
- Ensure vendor optimisation, value optimisation and cost efficiency within area of control
- Establishing appropriate and effective service delivery models
- Identify information technology initiatives in alignment with business requirements and strategic objectives and plan budget accordingly
- Enhance and further develop the corporate intranet solution into a more sociable and collaborative environment driven by clear user needs and adheres to the digital by default service standards
- Develop and customise intranet-based solutions with social tools that will help to organise, structure, find and re-use content with an easy to use web interface across web and mobile devices
- Develop custom features leveraging on available open source modules for social networking, feeds and aggregation and enterprise grade search engine
- Develop front end features that are responsive, accessible, highly usable and with interactive features that engage users and help staff to find reasons to use the intranet
- Develop functional and technical specification documentation
- Advise on best practice in web development, integrations and content management frameworks especially geared towards a corporate intranet
- Provide guidance and on the job technical handover to technical users and developers
- Work to tight deadlines managing time efficiently
- Record and report progress accurately during the update project, escalating any issues as appropriate
- Conduct testing of changes, this may include technical, accessibility, usability and user acceptance testing
- Assist in the evaluation of solutions and implement chosen products/systems
- Research, identify good practice and share knowledge of tools and techniques with the wider Digital team both developers and non-developers
- Work with business partners to implement new enhancements from the analysis to implementation phases, while ensuring that thorough testing occurs
- Support business objectives and ensure alignment with existing and new solutions
- Partner with Business stakeholders to define business and systems requirements for new technology deployments
- Create test plans / cases for enhancements, and coordinate and conduct user acceptance testing
- Perform direct research on potential technology solutions in support of software procurement efforts
- Respond to Customer Service Requests/Minor Enhancements as required
- Partner with Project Management Office (PMO) Team and Business Relationship Manager (BRM) to serve as technical lead over business-critical projects
- Act as liaison between the Customer and Third-Party Vendors to support and enhance systems
- Provide Operational support for existing solutions
- Receive Incidents relating to system issues and outages
- Produce timely incident reports documenting system downtime
- Support identification of Root Cause Analysis
- Monitor systems for issues such as quality, accessibility and work with departments to resolve
- Develop and maintain technical and operational procedure and work instruction documentation
- Provide on-call support as needed
- Benchmarking, analysing, and making recommendations with supporting data for the improvement and growth of the environment
- Negotiate service level agreements with IT service suppliers
- Monitor and mitigate all business risk activities (including business continuity and operational risk management taking place in the operational environment (both within the tecnological environment and other operational divisions, as appropriate) in line with industry regulations and legislation
- Ensure that required systems for support of organisational activities are implemented and aligned

**Qualifications & Experience**:

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Information Systems or related field at NQF 7 and/or 7 - 10 years’ experience in IT Systems and Applications Management of which 5 years’ is at management level
- Proven track record of the ability to initiate, plan and execute technical projects
- ITIL Certification would be an advantage
- 3 years’ Vendor Management and Service Level Management experience

**Knowledge and Skills**:

- Contract negotiations and management
- Service delivery
- IT System Development
- IT System Health Management
- IT Application Support
- IT Data Centre infrastructure
- IT Security
- ITIL Service, problem, incident, configuration management
- SLA and contract conformance and governance
- Design, implement ITS policy, procedures