Description
The Service Acceptance Manager role is open within the Service Acceptance team, reporting to the CT Strategy & Transformation (Distributed Infrastructure) Team Lead within the Service Acceptance group.
Service Acceptance is a team in the Corporate Technology Division that is the entry point into the division for any project:
The SAM (Service Acceptance Manager) identifies the teams that need to be involved, and ensures the proper definition, planning and coordination of the tasks that need to be done within Corporate Technology. But even more importantly is the service that the SAM renders to CT itself:
Guardian of production. Through the regular check, whether at each stage of the project the Production Acceptance Criteria are met, the SAM ensures that changes delivered into production are of sufficient quality to preserve production stability.
The role of the Service Acceptance Manager covers the following main objectives:
1) Manage and communicate in CT the impact of IT projects on technology and production environment
Act as first entry point in CT for IT projects to ensure all technology domains and production impacts are properly included
deliver the CT part of the project Business Case to ensure technology and production impacts are fully defined, appropriately costed and a proper risk assessment is performed
Ensure overall project leading role in CT for these developments (deliverables follow-up and sign-off, planning, dependencies, status meetings
2) Ensure compliance with system architecture standards and production acceptance criteria
Coordinate the delivery of the high-level technical design, in co-ordination with AD taking into account the impact of non-functional requirements ( -ities like availability, capacity, scalability)
Identify technology impact in terms of new/changed frameworks, the need for new tools or system software versions
Validate high-level design with subject matter experts in Systems Engineering and IT Security Architecture, obtain sign-off
Document and maintain the current production architecture (physical mapping of applications on Servers, dynamic view of transaction flows )
Define production acceptance criteria in collaboration with Production Services and Production Integration
Assess and document the impacts of the IT project on the production architecture.
Validate compliance with Production acceptance criteria in collaboration with Production Services and Production Integration
3) Guardian for optimizing Total Cost of Ownership for infrastructure changes
Define the optimal and least costly IT infra to implement a project, meeting the longer-term CT and domain cost reduction strategies. Includes initial project budgeting, and evaluating infra capital and operational expenditure impacts of various design options and project decisions.
periodically follow-up during project execution to ensure project benefits for running cost reductions are tracked, achieved, and reported relative to changing conditions or assumptions.
Required Skills
The candidate should have practical experience in project/programme leading, as well a good overall technical expertise in a complex environment like used (involving IBM Mainframe, Tandem, Unix, Windows, and advanced networking and storage).
The candidate will need the ability to plan, control and monitor the CT project definition and execution. This includes managing the scope, the budget, the scheduling of activities, the quality of the deliverables, the risks and issues that the project could encounter.
The candidate should be able to manage teams and relationships with various divisions, entities and service partners.
This requires strong interpersonal skills:
Excellent communication skills (listening, writing, and presenting) at all levels, from staff members to senior management level
Fluent in English is mandatory, good command of French is desirable
Excellent analytical and problem solving skills
Customer focused and process oriented
Ability to deal with conflicting priorities
Sensitive to production stability and support issues
Understanding of the business
Understanding of production services and CT's organization
Flexible
Ready to travel from time to time.
Rigorous, structured
Assertive, with good negotiation skills