We pledge "to prove IT can make a real difference to our customer's businesses". We work hard to ensure we understand what our customers need from their technology solutions and then we deliver.

We are an award-winning company who provide world class customer service; we think big and we hire great people. Version 1 are more than just another IT services company - we are leaders in implementing and supporting Oracle, Microsoft and AWS technologies.

Invest in us and we’ll invest in you; if you are driven, committed and up for a challenge, we want to meet you.

You will be joining our client's Investment (Technology) team as a Lead Release Manager within Release Management Team; allocated to a multi-disciplinary squad aligned to multiple business function. You will responsibile to increase maturity of our release management processes, strategic thinking and bringing in industry wide methodologies and best practices.

You will also be responsible to get us ahead of SOX and AAF audits by creating full view of controls we adhere to and streamlining the process of gathering evidences for all audit requirements also responsible for administration tasks for ALM (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket etc.) and Azure DevOps. You will lead larger and more complex initiatives.

You will also be responsible for managing stakeholder relationships on behalf of the team and will understand and analyse needs / requirements and will typically create the link between current and future ways of working with best practices in place.

Please note that you must have the legal right to live and work in the United Kingdom, we are not in position to provide sponsorship for this role.

Responsibilites

•    Build effective relationships across Technology with various stakeholders, Business users and suppliers.
•    Resource management including hiring and allocating individuals to match resource demand. Forecast demand for release resources and identify opportunities for greater efficiency across the business areas we support.
•    Develop common strategies for release governance across multiple business area we support and establish consistent release management processes.
•    Facilitate coordination of Release functions across various different business areas we support. Also perform hands-on releases.
•    Track an release calendar for all business areas we support and also represent in various forum like CAB etc.
•    Inform senior management of business area we support about exposure to release risk and effectively mitigate it.
•    Measure release cadence and effectiveness using common metrics across all Business areas we support.
•    Create common standards and formats for release playbooks and work with production control to standardize release decision-making.
•    Drive best practices and continuous improvement across the team. Define common mechanisms for rollback and standards for capturing release-related performance indicators.
•    Get us ahead of Audit requirements, create full view of all Controls & Checks (SOX and AAF) we adhere to and create awareness of these controls across all business areas we support so we can be forefront for all these audit requirements.
•    Represent Investment  Technology in all audit related meetings and tasks, face-off with all internal / external auditors providing all necessary and required artefacts.
•    Identify areas / tasks to be automated and Champion the improvement initiatives.
•    Define, manage and track progress of the priorities / initiatives to improve the maturity of Release Management function.
•    Manage and perform administration tasks for ALM (Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket etc.) and  Azure DevOps. 
•    Guide and advise on best practices and policies around Release processes, ALM and Azure DevOps usage.
 

•    Good knowledge of Microsoft Azure – DevOps, App Services, Service Bus, Azure VM, Azure SQL, Blob Storage, Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake Store, Azure Data Lake Analytics
•    Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Atlassian Suite, Microservices
•    Strong communication skills (written and verbal) and credibility in front of both business and technical stakeholders
•    Confidently interfacing with senior stakeholders across multiple departments and business units
•    Building good working relationships across Technology to support the delivery of change
•    Engaging early with stakeholders and positively shaping the overall pipeline of releases
•    Pragmatic approach to working within a fast-paced IS department
•    Logical and decisive approach to issue resolution
•    Persuasive approach to driving forward improvements

James Cregan
Talent Team Lead