Reporting to the Chief Infrastructure and Technology Officer, provide strategic and operational leadership to a diverse onshore and offshore team of 150+ personnel, including Application & Platform Mgmt. & Support, Enterprise Release & Deployment Mgmt., Service Desk, End User Support, ITSM tooling, IAM, and IT Operational Control, covering all business units across the Banking division of CBL. Ownership of IT Service and support processes inc. Major Incident & Incident Mgmt., Request Fulfilment, Problem Mgmt. and Release & Deployment Mgmt.; ensuring alignment to industry frameworks, methodologies, and best practices. Design, implement and continue to develop the Target Operating Model for Service/Support functions, leveraging locations and resource alignment that fulfils evolving requirements of the business whilst delivering service to agreed KPI’s and KRI’s.Manage and develop multi-million budgets, ensuring that funding is used appropriately and that risks to budgeting control are managed effectively.Negotiate contracts and manage relationships with external providers for services and products and monitor service delivery to ensure that agreed targets and standards are met on a cost-effective basis.Identify and mitigate operational risks in our production applications through effective controls and proactive risk management practices.Simplify and modernise the IT environment where possible through eliminating wastage and ensuring all IT services are running on supported technologies where appropriate.Develop a culture of performance management, improvement, and appraisal as a foundation for excellent organisational performance, providing mentoring and coaching for teams to achieve success.Standing quorum member at the Bank Technology Design Authority and Project Review Board to provide consultation and approval based on suitability of solution and operational and supportability readiness.

Lead an onshore and offshore team of 120, covering Application & Platform Support, Service Design & Transition, and Enterprise Release Management functions.Work with senior stakeholders to identify and implement application and platform management service improvement plans. Drive ongoing operational efficiency and cost reduction through exploitation of tooling and automation. Develop and enrich team skills and personal career journeys using coaching, training, and empowerment.Standing quorum member at the Bank Technology Design Authority and Project Review Board to provide consultation and approval based on suitability of solution and operational readiness.

Own the Problem Management process for the organisation covering all areas of IT, ensuring the problem management policy is aligned, identifying any issues with adherence and determining cause, ensuring that required corrective actions are taken and develop process improvement plans where necessary.Manage activities required to diagnose the root cause of incidents and to determine problem resolution through application and infrastructure based solutions with the goal of prevention, elimination or minimisation of the impact and risk, which deliver major cost savings, improved team performance, streamlined processes, creation of systems’ stability and reduction in errors.Initiate effective technical and operational application improvements, also ensuring that the resolution is implemented through the appropriate control procedures within the ITIL framework, especially change and release management, with focus on discovery and understanding of business or client requirements. Chair and lead the Problem Management Community of Practice and represent the process at the IT Service Management board.Provide operational consultation on new solutions being initiated into the organisation with defined operational acceptance criteria and non-functional requirements to pro-actively ensure possible future problems are resolved before delivery into production environment.Continued management of team and delivery of service as per previously held role (Senior Production Services Manager).

Manage and maintain system stability and high availability through the provision of 2nd-3rd line application support for over 80 internally and externally developed applications of varying complexity covering a multitude of technology platforms, according to best practice processes.Manage and lead a team of 40 staff to progress issues within a defined strategy and context, working closely with IT teams and business owners to create an environment under which supported services can be executed to contractual service level agreements, and perform analysis of workload ensuring the focus of effort yields the greatest benefit.Work directly with clients providing improvement recommendations based on specific requirements and pro-actively identify production risks, create actionable mitigation plans and provide consultation on specified changes to ensure compliance with the application architecture, standards and conventions. Perform role of IT Major Incident Manager for both application and infrastructure incidents, marshalling resources from around the organisation for quick resolution that is focused on both system and business process recovery, and leading internal and external walks-through of major incidents.Responsible for department BCP plan management planning and co-ordination, ensuring the department plans are regularly reviewed and updated in line with company policy, and that regular tests are performed as agreed with IFDS BCP team, identifying risks to the plan are escalated to the Risk Management Committee.Manage staff performance and progression through formalised performance evaluation, training and motivation.

Owned the Release Management process in conjunction with the software development lifecycle of varying methodologies, for a portfolio of applications across a multitude of technology platforms, including detailed planning and scheduling, coordinating with all stakeholders under matrix management for the implementation of code in the development, test and production environment. Assisted in projects allocated within releases and interdependencies to ensure milestone adherence so the integrity of the release could be measured whilst risks managed with clear mitigation strategies to resolve issues that affected release scope, schedule and quality.Led and managed Go-Live activities including the creation and execution of deployment methods and planning ensuring governance through the appropriate predefined quality gates to achieve successful sign off, client acceptance, and transition into the production environment. Managed ad-hoc and emergency release requirements including test and implementation strategy, contention management and retrofitting oversight. Chaired release steering, release review, release checkpoints and post live meetings with oversight of defect management and reporting to all release stakeholders applying control and management of the post live period and any releases required, including recording, documenting and communicating issues experienced within that period.

Management and deployment of in-house and third party digital eCommerce and Service Orientated (SO) applications and software ensuring availability to agreed project and release schedules, ensuring service level agreements were adhered to.Automation and continued improvement of deployment and build processes and procedures utilising various CI/CD toolsets and ensuring a value add methodology was applied for those automations. Management of the investigation and resolution of environmental, deployment or configuration incidents or problems in the software development life cycle process.Pro-actively reviewed release and project deliverables, ensuring all deployment requirements and identified potential risks to project/release delivery ensuring mitigation plans were in place before deployment.

Management of all support activities, ecommerce integration development, implementation and rollout of software and hardware installations for business critical multi-channel Point Of Sale, Customer Order and Credit Authorisation applications in a production environment. Ensuring reliability and availability at all times in order to support revenue maximisation. Designed and implemented systems and technical service improvement strategies for operational teams and management, ensuring that fault resolution processes are efficiently delivered on a value for money basis. An example of this would be an in-house design and developed implementation of a version control and automated deployment toolset for the point of sale environment covering both software and hardware. Responsible for providing senior management with problem management recommendations for incident resolution and implementation of preventative measures, based on sound options analysis and clear logical argument.