Incident Manager

WomenTech Network; Newcastle upon Tyne; On-site; GBP 45,000 - 65,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology company in Newcastle upon Tyne is seeking an experienced Incident Manager to oversee service incidents and facilitate effective communication among stakeholders. The ideal candidate will possess strong organizational and problem-solving skills, with the ability to simplify complex technical issues for a non-technical audience. The role involves continuous improvement of incident and change management processes while ensuring a high-quality customer experience. The company values collaborative efforts within DevOps to enhance service availability and operational excellence.

Qualifications

• Ability to articulate complex technical issues to a non-technical audience.
• Experience in coordinating across multiple functions and segments.
• Proficiency in English, both verbal and written.

Responsibilities

• Lead high-pressure incidents and manage communications with stakeholders.
• Administer and continuously improve Incident Management and Change Management processes.
• Collaborate with DevOps and Product Engineering teams to enhance service availability.

Skills

Communication skills

Organizational skills

Problem-solving skills

Influencing skills

Interpersonal skills

Multitasking

Job description

The role of Incident Manager is to minimize the adverse effects of service impairments while providing all concerned with insights about the situation so they can either aid the customer in continuing to run their business, ensure the right resources are engaged to resolve it, and take whatever steps are necessary to avoid its reoccurrence.

As an Incident Manager, the colleague should be able to perform his/her duties with some direction and oversight as well as manage complex and high impacting impairments.

The Incident Manager has a good understanding and experience of the ITIL processes that underpin the role: Incident Management, Change Management, and Problem Management. This position plays an important role in the company’s global operational excellence strategies by feeding into plans and delivering on goals. In addition, the Incident Manager will collaborate with members of the rest of the Product Operations sub‑functions, feed into service improvement plans and provide feedback with a focused aim to raise service availability, resiliency, and overall maturity. Lastly, the Incident Manager will collaborate closely with members of the customer services sub‑functions to ensure impacted customers are informed about the incident in a timely manner and are given information that will enable them to continue to run their business.

The Cloud Operations DevOps teams are responsible and accountable for Sage’s online Product portfolio. The teams ensure our Products and Services are constantly available for our customers to use to run their businesses. They also provide meaningful insights about impairments that enable product and service owners to further improve the durability of their systems.

The Service Centre team works alongside these DevOps teams with a primary focus on leading incident management, problem management, administering change management, and implementing standardized dashboards for monitoring, alerting, and reporting. This is a 24/7 operation that requires the Incident Manager to manage any service incidents that may arise, with some oversight from senior members of the team for more complex situations, and drive root cause analysis through to future service improvements. Ability to quickly analyze, assess and drive decisions is key to the role to ensure that service impairments are remediated swiftly.

Key Accountabilities and Decision Ownership

• Take personal accountability for leading high‑pressure incidents, managing various workstreams and senior stakeholder communications to ensure that products remain available, secure and performant with some oversight for more complex issues.
• Understanding of operational risk and accountability for delivering an excellent service to our customers.
• Managing stakeholder expectations, and influencing decisions.
• Administer and continuously improve Incident Management processes.
• Administer and continuously improve Change Management processes; lead change boards.
• Improve reporting that will provide all key stakeholders with information and help identify improvements to products on behalf of the customer.
• Use experience and knowledge to identify opportunities to simplify customer experience, mitigate risk, improve usability.
• Collaborate with DevOps & Product Engineering teams, feeding into service improvement plans and providing feedback with a focused aim to raise service availability.
• Improve the out‑of‑hours customer experience by participating in our 24x7 on‑call rota.

Skills, Know‑How and Experience

Must have:

• Accomplished communicator – able to articulate complex technical issues in simple terms when communicating with non‑technical audience or Sage business stakeholders.
• Strong organisational, coordination and problem‑solving skills.
• Experience dealing with multiple teams in different functions/segments, multitasking & prioritisation skills.
• Influencing and interpersonal skills.
• Proficiency in English language, verbal and written, with ability to build relationships and influence, including senior stakeholder management.

Preferred:

• Proven experience of delivering a world class customer experience across a portfolio of products.
• Experience with applications deployed in either AWS or Azure that are using distributed computing, containers, Kubernetes and/or serverless technologies.