Director, Application Support / Branch Service Delivery



Job Description:

As a senior leader in Application Support, your passion of technology will inspire a team of creative problem solvers to find new ways to manage and support our day-to-day business needs. Here, you will put your years of solid critical thinking to use, driving strategic change, managing budgets, people, and the innovative technology they create. In addition to overseeing the maintenance of our commerce application systems, you’ll foster and manage relationships, both internally as well as with our clients and business partners. Using industry best practices, you’ll oversee application troubleshooting, maintenance, identification, escalation, and resolution of issues. You’ll be responsible for overall team management and mentoring of staff, as needed. As part of JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s global technology group, you’ll be able to collaborate with highly motivated teams from around the world who are as committed to innovation as you are.

Roles & Responsibilities:

The Branch Service Delivery Director is the key individual across Infrastructure and Production Management (IPM) for ensuring that we meet our branch, business and IPM goals for delivering technology-based services acorss all Chase retail banking branches. These include applications, infrastructure, and day-to-day operations. Our ability to deliver on the service levels needed by our internal and external customers is a key driver of success in IPM. Their input and leadership are seen at the most senior level of IPM and often by senior levels in the business units.

Service Level Agreements are a key component of the Service Delivery Manager’s (SDM) role. The SDM is responsible for the working document which incorporates the business’ requirements and the design of the service into an agreement between the business and IS. This requires that the SDM have both a strong understanding of the business, application, infrastructure, and supporting teams. In addition, we leverage external providers for services as well, so the SDM must be able to be a strong negotiator.

Communication is also critical to the SDM’s position, as they must interact with virtually anyone in the Retail LOB as well as into GTI. The SDM has responsibility for reviewing our Service Delivery performance on a regular basis with our customers, in weekly partnership meetings. In addition, they are expected to use these meetings to better shape our Service Delivery and bring to light changing business needs. They share these efforts with Business Relationship Managers and senior members of the business units. At times, these may also include presentations and discussions with the Executive Leadership Team member from this business area, as well as senior IS leadership, including the CIO.

While the SDM does not manage the changes made to their environments, they are accountable for all changes to infrastructure and application that could impact Service Delivery to their business and external customers. As such they work with the change managers in each block and infrastructure, the resource managers implementing the changes and their business counterparts to ensure smooth operation. SDMs are required to have experience in the technologies for the areas they support, though they aren’t necessarily the SME on that technology.

Issues will arise and the SDM will be integral to getting Service Delivery back on track. Issues themselves are usually managed by others, such as the application development managers and leads. However, the SDM is ultimately accountable for the delivery of service and therefore accountable for the successful resolution of issues impacting that service. As such, they will be actively engaged in communication of lengthy issues, reviews of trends across issues, and root cause analysis (RCA).

For recurring issues, the SDM will lead a Service Level Improvement (SLI) team to further investigate the bigger problem. The SDM must have the necessary technical and diagnostic skills to successfully work with the teams to complete these tasks. The SDM should proactively ensure that development hours are being set aside for the proper delivery of the services and that application teams are providing the appropriate support so that service levels are met.

Application Support & Monitoring:

Monitor infrastructure, servers, databases, distributed batch jobs.

Support Sustained Resiliency, Disaster Recovery, and High Availability events.

Aggressively respond to service requests from Client facing support teams, Operations, Risk/control partners, etc.

Troubleshoot technical issues (Java/J2EE, .Net, Cloud etc) or escalate and work with appropriate technology teams to provide solutions

Service Delivery Manager Characteristics:

1. Strong sense of ownership

Feeling of personal accountability for all areas in scope. Willingness to drive people on all sides of an issue to a common understanding and then drive them toward resolution.

2. Willingness to learn

Call it a thirst of knowledge, or a simply fear of being caught without an answer, but this position requires someone who wants to understand the business process as well as the IS environment that supports it.

3. Understanding of business process

Not only does this position require someone who wants to learn, but actually does learn the environment from top to bottom. This person would understand the business processes, the applications, the hardware, and the data flows among them. This person would know if a change or performance impact in one area affected another area.

4. Courage to speak with any level of management, and the ability to deliver bad news as well as good

SDMs are responsible for trending and reporting - and this means highlighting areas for improvement. This person must be able to speak to the most senior members of the organization and describe these areas in a fair and dispassionate manner, and secure commitment to change when required.

5. Understanding of the technical environment

Understanding the limitations of the technology and be familiar with the basic hardware and software building blocks of the environment. While not the SME, they do need to be familiar enough to lead diagnostic discussions and help drive the technical teams to the root issue.

6. Leadership

Assess a situation, prioritize requirements, and then go out to any IS team, including both development and infrastructure, and get support for the work.

7. Analytic skills

Ability to gather performance and trend data and create information that is useful to decision makers such as dev and resource managers. This skill may be used to address issues or to ensure sufficient resources to meet service levels. Need to be able to process information provided and ask next probing question.

8. Communication skills

Ability to build relationships, facilitate partnership meetings, clearly articulate concepts in both spoken and written form, actively listen, and provide the right level of information to the intended recipient.

9. Self-Directed

Has a strong sense of self and purpose. Understands tasks and role, and does not need daily reassurances, yet maintains an open dialogue with all of stakeholders.

10. Follow Through

Gathers and presents information (such as performance trending or recurring problems), but then also follows up to ensure that the appropriate actions are taken. Feels personally accountable for the tasks being completed, either directly or indirectly