Release Manager recruitment

An experienced Release Manager is required to join a team responsible for delivering releases of various complexities to the test and production environments.

The Release Management role involves working closely with most other teams within the Information Systems department, primarily the Project Managers, Business Analysts, Development and Application Support in order to produce an effective implementation plan that will deliver the change with minimum impact to production. The Release Manager will be responsible for looking after releases of various complexities and durations, some of which will be planned and delivered over a matter of days and others taking several months. A good working relationship is also required with the infrastructure teams, third party suppliers and the business.

The role also requires a close working relationship with Testing and Configuration Management who, in addition to their source control responsibilities, also act as Environment Managers. The candidate must have an excellent understanding and previous exposure to the IT development lifecycle in order to perform effectively.

This role would suit someone who enjoys being part of a fast paced delivery environment and who can react quickly to changing priorities and requirements but who is also capable and very effective at working on larger, lengthier projects that require a detailed delivery plan.

Release Management Responsibilities

- Plan and produce effective implementation plans for delivering new functionality and/or upgrading the existing systems.
- Produce plans for the introduction of new applications and/or the removal of existing applications
- Successfully deliver changes by managing the implementation team and adhering to the plan
- To read as well as produce technical drawings when required to show the relationships between the various applications impacted by the change
- Quickly deal with implementation issues and ensure there is minimum impact to delivery and/or BAU
- Update plans under pressure to strict deadlines
- Identify and control risks during the planning stages and escalate appropriately
- Effectively work from an evolving plan while still controlling and managing change
- Proposing a suitable go-live date, plan and strategy
- Proposing the scale of the delivery by identifying releases that may be delivered together or that should be broken down into more manageable parts.
- Delivery scope:
- Delivering new functionality to the UAT and production environments
- Implementing software and hardware upgrades to existing applications within the UAT and production environment
- Delivering new applications and/or removing existing applications from the UAT and production environments
- Managing the implementation of changes into the UAT environment that have gone into production as an Emergency in order to keep the UAT environment in line with production
- Managing the implementation of configuration and Control M (scheduling tool) changes into the UAT environment as part of the environment refresh process
- Managing the withdrawal of changes from the UAT environments
- Implementing changes that will resolve defects in existing releases in the UAT environments

Other Responsibilities

- Able to best utilise the UAT environment by effective planning of the releases that should be tested concurrently in a given environment at a given time.
- Able to ensure environment issues have minimum impact to testing by determining the most efficient way to recover from an environment issue
- Defining the requirements of the UAT environment that most efficiently meet the needs of all releases in scope to test in the next cycle while considering the impact of future scope changes
- Advising on the best course of action when once or more releases are unable to fit within the required UAT environment cycle

Essential Skills
- Ability to work well under pressure
- Able to deal with frequently changing requirements
- A strong problem solving ability
- Forward thinking
- Enjoys working as part of a team
- Pragmatic and analytical thinking
- Excellent attention to detail and highly accurate
- Excellent written and oral communication skills
- Flexible, dedicated and with a 'can do' attitude
- Able to follow technical conversations and communicate technical information effectively to those that are non technical
- Good understanding of the workings of all other teams that form part of the IT lifecycle, in particular UAT, Configuration Management and Environment Management
- Excellent academic record
- Highly competent with MS Visio, Powerpoint, Project Excel
- Strong experience in the IT industry, ideally including working as Release, Development, Technical or Project Manager with experience delivering change
- Familiar with popular IT lifecycle management tools and source control tools
- Excellent technical knowledge and general architecture understanding
- Has excellent knowledge best practise within the IT development lifecycle and has worked with ITIL and Prince II practices
- The role will involve the need to work late on some evenings and sometimes weekends as many changes are delivered out of normal office hours. This may be at short notice

Desirable Skills
- A 2:1 or above or post graduate qualification in a Computer science related degree
- 26 UCAS points or higher
- Previous experience working as a developer (ideally with Java or .NET)
- Can demonstrate a strong technical knowledge
- Familiar with SOX, CMMI or equivalent standards.
- A background in a financial institution, ideally Investment Management.
- Experience of working with third party infrastructure suppliers.

MG is an equal opportunities employer and welcomes applications from a diverse background.