Description
Senior Application AnalystBirmingham based
Inside IR35
All candidates must hold active DV Clearance due to the timing of the project we are unable to put someone through clearance
Job Summary
This role will report to the National Applications and Data Manager to provide Application Support at a senior level. The individual will support all Applications pertaining, including operational, business as usual and project tasks.
As a senior they will be responsible for outlining and implementing an ITIL aligned Application Management strategy with the assistance of the Application Support Manager. They will also mentor Applications Support Analysts and assist in the continuous development of the Applications and Data Team.
This role is vital to ensure national applications are supported by providing best practice through incidents, service requests, problems and changes.
As a senior, the role holder will be expected to mentor and aid the learning pathways of Application Analysts as well as being a SME for the application estate and the underlying technologies.
This role requires a flexible working approach and may be required to travel to sites around the UK as appropriate as well as working on-call.
Essential Experience
The role holder must have:
- Excellent communication with strong listening, written and verbal communication skills.
- Robust experience with multi-tasking and time management skills, with a practical, methodical and structured approach to work - able to work on own initiative and within a team environment.
- Strong analytically and problem-solving skills to provide root cause analysis of problems and viable solutions, including appropriate mitigations.
- Ability to read and analyse application logs to identify issues and escalate as necessary.
- Understanding of application design & development, including agile methodologies, application and database design, infrastructure technologies.
- Strong experience in writing and executing complex SQL queries and Familiarity with stored procedures, views, functions, SQL jobs for Microsoft SQL databases.
- Credibility: The post holder must be must be assertive, attentive and credible with staff, management and stakeholders.
- Excellent inter-personal skills. The post holder must be adept at assessing and discussing business options with senior management, discussing the implications of those issues and of alternative solutions. The post holder must therefore have a high level of interpersonal skills, communication skills, business and technical accumen in order to gain credibility with colleagues at all levels.
- Attitudes & behaviours: The post holder must have the ability to work independently and also as part of a team. They must exhibit the ability to work under their own autonomy and prioritise their own work load. They must exhibit the ability to work under pressure and with competing demands. They must have enthusiasm, commitment, loyalty and determination to achieve results.
- Confidence to step in when systems are unexpectedly unavailable and deal with stakeholders in a calm way. Manage supplier and stakeholder communications and updates on problem solving. Pushing to establish route cause of service outages and implementing changes in response to these outages in a controlled manner
- Qualifications: Educated to degree level or have equivalent experience in an software development or support environment.
Key Tasks
- Working within a service team monitoring components such as web Servers, applications Servers, log files, disk space and MS-SQL databases
- A point of escalation for all Application related issues within the Application Support team.
- Working as part of a second line support function following incident management through to incident resolution. Natural problem solving with ability to apply previous experience to new problems working towards route cause analysis.
- Ensuring the entire application estate aligns within Application Lifecycle Management
- Working with third party suppliers, stakeholders and departmental ICT teams to help deliver patch/release of applications while coordinating vendor support.
- Understanding of ITIL process, incident management, change management and problem management including working to strict SLAs.
- Maintaining Middleware such as; IIS, MS-SQL Server, Active Directory, ASP and. NET, including troubleshooting, performance tuning, basic queries and resolving bottlenecks.
- Report writing with tools such as PowerShell, JavaScript, HTML and SQL.
- Ownership of application backup, restores and the Application Disaster Recovery (DR) process.
- Daily support of COTS and WEB based software applications with an emphasis on the ability to problem solve. Creating knowledge base articles and up-skilling other members of the team following resolution.
- Ability to understand business logic, technical tools and be an analytic thinker.
- Strong customer focus - understanding the needs of the internal and external customer and keeping them in mind when taking actions or making decisions. Able to attend Senior User groups nationally and articulate complex technical issues to both peers and non-technical staff.
- Expectation to handle low level disciplinary issues within the Applications and Data Team and escalate to the National Application and Data Manager when required
Desirable
- Microsoft accreditation desirable.
- Enterprise Administration certification desirable.
- ITIL v3/4 Foundation desirable