Application Support Manager

Description

Purpose of the Role 

The Application Support Manager provides management, strategic direction and mentorship for the team of Support Managers they are responsible for, ensuring objectives and measurements are met or exceeded and can demonstrate their management of the teams through regular management reviews and reporting. 

This is a strategic role working across not only the service and support teams, but also collaborating and working effectively with other business areas. This includes product, development and all technical teams. This is a pivotal role in supporting our customers and ensuring our services are robust and client focussed. 

The Application Support Manager is accountable for the incident and service request management practice ensuring resolution to incidents within Service/Operational Level Agreements within the application support function. 

They specialise in product knowledge usage, configuration, deployment, and workflow. Working within support with both the Service Desk Manager to ensure effective triage and improved first time fix, and the Technical Support Manager co-ordinating all technical elements of provisioning of issue resolution.  

They mitigate risks by the effective identification and deployment of corrections (work-around) or corrective actions (root cause fixes) and provide identification of potential defects requiring a known error to be registered, or identification of repeated occurrences for the registration of a problem record.  

The Application Support Manager reacts to the changing demand on the business through allocation of resource where applicable within the teams they are responsible for, ensuring appropriate capacity and competency is available to meet the demand. 

Duties and Responsibilities: 

• Accountable for the Incident & Service Request Management practice. Ensuring support is established and operating effectively ensuring the practice is followed and demonstrate the effectiveness of the practice.
• Identify improvements, in collaboration with the Service Desk Manager and Technical Support Manager, to the Service Desk or Incident and Service Request Management practices from management review and service strategy. Initiate and contribute to continual improvement.
• Identify the demand, capacity and competency requirements for the practice and leverage resource as appropriate to meet demands.
• Ensure deliverables are met and outputs from the practice meet the expectations of outcome demonstrating value for the practice.
• Resource and matrix management applying management principles effectively.
• Demonstrate the effectiveness of practice through successful audit completion and monthly management review and reporting against objectives and measurements.
• Responsible for the investigation and management of tickets through to resolution. Or to ensure that all investigative options have been exhausted within the competency available and escalate as appropriate to higher competency tiers.
• Accountable for ensuring reviews are conducted where applicable to ensure lessons learned and service improvement actions are taken whilst contributing articles to the internal and external knowledgebase.
• Ensure service levels are met within their respective teams and reduce the time taken following effective incident management practice.
• Responsible for the deployment of corrections, corrective actions and preventive action for all incidents ensuring services provided remain operational and minimise disruption to customers.
• Responsible for the identification of risks and engagement of the risk management practice to inform risk owners of the requirement for risk assessment and mitigation.
• Accountable for the communication with customers to advise of progress on incidents and service requests as appropriate using omni-channel communications and effective use of the ITSM.
• Foster collaboration and effective communication with other IT teams to ensure seamless coordination and timely resolution of changes.
• Form part of, and lead where required, the application support team in their remit within the major incident process.
• Ability to travel for customer engagements and meetings as required.
• Participation in the on-call rota for the provision of management support.

Requirements: 

• Demonstrable experience of managing a service desk and incident operation, working within Service/Operational Level Agreements and Availability. Minimum 5 years.
• Experience of a risk management and a risk-based approach to service management.
• Strong relationship building, influencing, and negotiating skills.
• Ability to collaborate with staff at all levels to work either as part of a team or independently as required by the task at hand.
• Excellent management knowledge and skills (Example: delegation, influencing, coaching, performance, conflict management).
• Demonstrable strategic thinking.

Skills Required:  

• Good documentation skills.
• Excellent people & relationship management skills
• Strong written & verbal communication and interpersonal skills.
• Good working knowledge of MS Office applications (i.e. Outlook, Word, Excel, Project, and Visio)

At System C, we prioritise transparency in our job requirements and selection criteria, ensuring they are based solely on the essentials needed for effective job performance. We consciously avoid assumptions that could skew our perception of a candidate’s suitability for hire.

Our recruitment practices are designed to ensure that no applicant is unfairly disadvantaged by procedures or requirements that disproportionately affect protected groups without being essential for the job.

For every position, we develop a detailed job description and person specification. This approach maintains our focus on the true demands of the role and the skills, experience, and qualifications necessary. During interviews, we involve multiple interviewers where possible to further mitigate unintentional bias, thereby promoting a fair and equitable hiring process.