Release Co-ordinator

The release coordinator is responsible for understanding and managing the content, interactions, inter-dependencies, deployments and implementations for all projects within a Business Process Area (BPA). The role of the release coordinator is to lead and facilitate the process for identifying and documenting all release-level content for a BPA, business and technical dependencies and the approach to testing the release, resulting in a production ready application release. This includes identifying and managing risks at the release level, identifying mitigating actions and contingency plans and making recommendations to BPA leadership and the release management team in relation to required decisions to ensure successful release delivery. The release coordinator is also accountable for obtaining sign-off at each release governance gate including the production readiness review, and in ensuring that metrics and lessons learned are produced to enable continuous improvement of the release process.

The release coordinator is the primary liaison between the release management team and the BPA, which includes communication of all release level events/activites that may affect the BPA (such as changes to environment plans/schedules).

Principal Duties Responsibilities
• Lead and facilitate a release core team within the BPA, which is a virtual team comprising the Technical Project Managers, the Technical Architects, the Release Test Manager, and the Business Architects, including representation from Application Managed Services (AMS), in the delivery of all sized releases.
• Manage dependencies that cross delivery teams, BPA’s and AMS.
• Facilitate the identification of release level risks and issues and manage these through the development of mitigating actions and contingency plans, and ensuring these plans are executed in a timely manner.
• Provides regular updates to BPA management and the release management team on release progress, risks and issues and provide recommendations to enable decision making.
• Manage the release level milestones and, with the Release and Deployment Management (RDM) team, manage the code deployments to the various environments.
• Partnering with Business Process Area (BPA) Delivery Team Mangers, plus managers in Application Managed Services (AMS) and Global Infrastructure Group (GIG), identify release content and manage release content, for the BPA, by applying a robust change control process.
• Represent the BPA at release-level change control reviews.
• Ensure adherence to the various release level processes, procedures, governance gates, assist the technical project management team with the creation of the governance readiness review materials and lead the presentation of these to senior IT and business leaders ensuring that required decisions are made and that sign off is received.
• Drive continuous improvement through trend reporting analysis and release metrics management.
• As needed per release, assist with daily overview and oversight of the RDM accountability, including coordination with Release Test Manager, Test Data Management, project teams, and others. Provide critical thinking, decision making and communication as necessary.
• Manage the release process end-to-end for the BPA, from the planning of release content through to actual release deployment to production.
• Coordinates and participates in regular post-implementation reviews and presents release metrics in order to assist with the evaluation of release quality.
• Participate in interdepartmental and cross departmental planning and collaboration as needed.
• Ensure that release communications are timely and accurate.
• May perform other Release and Project Management duties as assigned.

Job Specifications
• Ability to understand the technical software of application releases.
• Ability to assess and evaluate priorities, including information gathered from multiple sources
• Strong interpersonal, communications and organizational skills
• Ability to provide command and control presence with a calming influence under pressure; particularly when there are multiple competing, high priority issues to be resolved.
• Strong cross-functional partnership skills and ability to facilitate risk mitigation/issue resolution.
• Process and continuous improvement orientation
• Strong understanding of software development life-cycle and planning process
• Ability to interact effectively with a variety of contacts at all levels of the organization and be comfortable dealing with ambiguity and frequent changes in priorities and direction.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, information systems, business management or other related field preferred.
• Experience in release management, project management, program management, change management, configuration management, quality assurance/quality control, or application/software development preferred.
• Strong knowledge of System Development Life Cycle, testing and defect tracking tools such as HP Quality Center preferred.
• Meets the standards for this position, as defined in the Talent Management Framework

For more information or to apply please contact Aileen Lalor on 09064 78104 or aileen.lalor@collinsmcnicholas.ie