Senior Manager Operational Readiness

Empowering Africa’s tomorrow, together one story at a time.
- With over 100 years of rich history and strongly positioned as a local bank with regional and international expertise, a career with our family offers the opportunity to be part of this exciting growth journey, to reset our future and shape our destiny as a proudly African group.

Job Summary

Develop & implement portfolio (multiple BU) technology operational readiness plans, integrate change & release plans with other portfolio plans & ensure the successful deployment of technology updates & changes in various environments (e.g. production, DR &UAT) with mínimal to no disruption & or impact to service provisioned to customers. This includes but is not limited to: - Change & Release Planning - Scheduling - Resource, Capacity & Capability planning & alignment - Coordination - Prioritisation - Risk, Governance & Compliance - Change Controls - Change Approvals - Quality Assurance - Knowledge & Document Management - Monitoring parameters - Overall operational readiness (people, process, systems)

Job Description
- Build knowledge & expertise in bank wide architecture & technology stacks (products & services) to enable effective operational readiness planning & execution
- Act as the custodian of & embed the organisation’s operational readiness framework across the portfolio (e.g. change & release procedures & standards release standards & procedures, toolkits etc.)
- Build operational readiness awareness & capability across the portfolio
- Partner the portfolio Service Delivery teams & Technology product & service tribes & squads, to translate technology roadmaps into operational change & release plans
- Facilitate integration processes with other portfolio leads to identify change & release risk & align planning & prioritisation efforts to achieve mínimal disruption to customers
- Develop detailed change & release documentation & communication across the change & release lifecycle (reflecting the scope of the changes, risks & risk implications of proposed changes, prioritisation, schedules, resource requirements, acceptance criteria, roles & responsibilities, integration points, quality assurance processes, monitoring parameters and processes etc. Do this across the change & release lifecycle (pre-during-post change & release)
- Coordinate all change controls & change approval processes with the appropriate governance forums
- Lead regular operational readiness reviews ahead of the change & release ‘go live’ & identify risks & mitigating actions
- Leverage insights from operational readiness reviews & past events (DR, MIM etc.) to align people, processes & systems across portfolios ahead of the changes & releases
- Hold accountability for the alignment of changes & releases to Group Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, DR & regulatory standards
- Translate the change & release plans into detailed project / program / orchestration plans. These plans must include: milestones, Go / No Go activities, detailed schedules, prioritization, interdependencies, testing & qa requirements, acceptance criteria, approvals etc. for all pre-prod & prod activity
- Facilitate & coordinate all change & release implementation & communications
- Facilitate ‘lessons learnt’ reviews with relevant stakeholders across the value chain & leverage lessons learnt to improve overall operational readiness processes & practices for the portfolio
- Coordinate & oversee the successful implementation of all changes & releases
- Monitor change & release performance & metrics post-prod, identify risk & implement mitigating actions
- Manage the “single source of truth” for all technology changes across the portfolio (pre, during & post implementation)
- Lead portfolio specific incident & event management processes during the change / release process (where incidents occur) and ensure appropriate coordination across the value chain for their resolution
- Implement document & knowledge management systems & processes for all Portfolio related change & release information
- Manage all change & release reporting for the portfolio (pre, during & post change & release)
- Stay ahead of the curve on operational readiness, change, release & incident management best practices
- Contribute to the continuous improvement of operational readiness frameworks & tools

Accountability: Finance, Risk & Governance
- Ensure alignment to all Group Technology Standards, Processes & Practices (Engineering & DevOps, Security, Architecture, Infrastructure, Change & Release, DR)
- Ensure operational readiness planning & implementation alignment to relevant industry standards e.g. ITIL, Agile, DevOps etc
- Participate risk & governance processes e.g audit
- Lead reporting & remediation on all non-compliant operational readiness activity
- on time & quality & in alignment with Group & Regulatory standards
- Participate & positively contribute to various risk & governance forums e.g. architecture etc.
- Ensure alig