Practice Director - Operations

Role Purpose:

Determine ‘How’ work within the Practice is done and ‘Who’ does the work. Develop and implement appropriate standards and processes to drive efficient operations across the Practice. Ensure the availability, performance, monitoring and security that is expected of our best-in-class cloud platform. Governance of agreed operations standards to ensure consistency across service families o Effectively lead a team of specialist IT professionals focused on creating simple and scalable solutions to complex problems via deployment and operations. Rapidly embed and mature a successful operations discipline within UKCloud so that our portfolio can be scaled gracefully. Ensure an effective shared workflow alliance with other Practices within the Capability Lifecycle operating unit (e.g., in the provision of 3rd line technical support to the Customer Success operating unit).  The Practice Director for Operations leads a cross-functional team of specialist IT professionals focused on proactively and reactively managing the environment. 

Key Responsibilities:  

• Ensure the day to day running and maintenance of the platform providing support for services and product components which enable the business and its customers to consume our services. 
• Manage adherence to operations standards through the execution of documented processes and procedures developed by Engineering and provide continuous improvement feedback
• Ensure deployment of mature and approved deployment packages into production under delegated authority with appropriate controls and Role Based Access. 
• Ensure proactive monitoring and assessment of vendor patches and upgrades, resulting in their deployment or escalation to Engineering for major versions or where dependences are identified.
• Actively support career development opportunities aligned with improving the overall capability of the Operations Practice
• Managing the flow of work for optimum efficiency by maintaining accurate team velocity across BAU and other categories for the wider business 
• Authority/Decision Making: Owns the processes and standards governing the performance of the Operations Practice.
• Allocates Operations resources across Service Families and ‘Squads’ (i.e., Projects)
• Actively contributes to business prioritisation
• Ensure operations improvements through continued platform efficiencies as part of end-of-life technology tracking and replacements with suitable alternative, where this can be achieved without reengineering. Accountable for Capacity, Availability, Performance and Problem investigation through to closure Accountable for overall quality and assurance through the control and management of tasks to ensure performance and reliability maintenance of deployed capabilities 
• Ensure process consistency in the deployment of quality and tested release packages into production.  Accountable for Incident escalation with 3rd party providers and vendors. Overall accountability for pastoral care of individuals within the Operations Practice (in conjunction with Practice managers).

Knowledge/Skills/Experience:

• Demonstrable experience in Service Management and operating large and complex environments. You will use your expertise to develop and implement appropriate standards and processes to manage and protect live services across the Practice.
• Experience coaching others to adopt best practice 
• Ability to lead governance and assurance activities
• Highly organised – a good planner
• Excellent and clear communicator (written, verbal and visual)

About UKCloud

UKCloud provides an unbeatable, secure UK public cloud. Focused solely on serving the UK Public Sector. We are committed to assurance and security while delivering flexible, agile and value-based cloud hosting to our customers.

• Doing the right thing. By delivering better services to citizens and better value for taxpayers, by reducing the time, costs, and risks of digital transformation.
• Accelerating digitalisation with local multi-cloud experts. Our award-winning customer support is here to help our customers throughout their journey with us.
• Harnessing multiple cloud services. To help organisations use multi-cloud to address existing and legacy IT as well as cloud native applications.
• Uncompromising safety and integrity. As we believe the UKs public services are a national asset that needs protecting and nurturing.

Formed in 2012, UKCloud is based in Farnborough (Hampshire) and Corsham (Wiltshire). We have a team of 200+ people and we continue to grow! We are looking for people who want a rewarding career in a business who truly invest in you as an individual.

Colleague Benefits:

Competitive salary plus 10% bonus potential paid quarterly

25 days' annual leave increasing to 30 days with length of service + half day birthday leave + charity day + Bank Holidays

Options to buy and sell annual leave

Flexible office and home working options 

Contributory pension

Life and medical insurance

Funded team social and charity events

Onsite facilities including cafe, restaurant and gym

Company funded fruit and soft drinks plus Friday breakfasts

Wellbeing initiatives

Cycle to work tax efficient scheme

Access to ample free parking

Shuttle bus to national rail services

UKCloud is an equal opportunities employer and positively encourages applications from suitably qualified and eligible applicants. Applicants must be eligible to work and live in the UK and will be required to undergo and maintain appropriate UK government security clearance.