Communication Technologies Operations Manager

Technical Operations Manager
Job Code: 4806
Grade: L

The Technical Operations Manager position is a member of the Communication Technologies (CT) team. CT is part of University IT, the central IT organization for Stanford University. The individual in this position reports directly to the Director of Communication Technologies. 

As the Technical Operations Manager for the Communication Technologies Operations Team, this individual will utilize their technical, operational, and management expertise to guide and enable a team of senior level staff to successfully and efficiently administer, maintain and support Unified Communications solutions for Stanford University and Stanford Healthcare. This individual will be responsible for ensuring the team effectively performs and completely fulfills the operational duties required to ensure system availability and service level agreements are met. The Technical Operations Manager will be available on a 24 x 7 on-call basis to lead and perform the necessary responsibilities required to meet expectations of all Stanford entities for the critical functions Communication Technologies enables.

Primary responsibilities include: 

Operational Excellence: 

• Ensure systems management responsibilities such as monitoring, backup, patching, security, change control are being performed and align with industry best practice 
• Manage the day-to-day operational activities for a team of Communication Subject Matter Experts, to include on-call rotation. 
• Monitor the CT Operations Service Now Incident queue for tickets and follow up with staff on status and remove obstacles that may be preventing prompt resolution of incidents.
• Facilitate and Coordinate conversations and efforts involving diverse teams: system administration, database administration, Network Engineering, IT Service Desk, , and the IT Operations Center (ITOC).
• Ensure that all equipment (hardware/software) has a valid support contract or is under warranty. Manage in-scope hardware and software maintenance and support agreements
• Act as the primary Incident Commander for major Communications incidents
• Facilitate and coordinate the activities of the incident response through the ITOC technical bridge
• Ensure that the appropriate technical resources are engaged towards the resolution of the incident
• Insure that established incident and escalation processes are being followed in a timely manner
• Author content and coordinate with the relevant escalation/incident contacts   to provide timely incident status updates to impacted parties, partner teams, leadership and stakeholders for all Stanford entities.
• Document, maintain and communicate to ITOC escalation plans for all services with a 24x7 profile 
• Review all CT change requests to adhere to the UIT and Healthcare Change Management processes, and ensure relevant stakeholder, partner teams and user community concerns have been addressed.
• Responsible for reviewing and approving the Service Transition Plan from project phase to post deployment phase/steady state. 
• Ensure the deployed release and the resulting service meets customer expectations, and that IT operations are in place and capable of supporting the new service. 
• Develop strategic relationships with the Business Owners responsible for supported services to ensure that operational tasks to sustain the service are given the appropriate priority by team members 
• Track and report the performance of operations by collecting and monitoring metrics and ensuring that performance aligns with defined business targets or SLAs. Observe trends that could inform opportunities for process improvement 

Technical Leadership 

• Motivate and develop team collaboration opportunities and cultivate cross training of staff for the support of incoming applications and systems
• Partner with other support organizations to ensure end-to-end application functionality 
• Manage bench strength to ensure depth in various technologies (current and future); become an expert in some of these yourself 
• Work with SMEs to foster train-the-trainer methods for sharing knowledge to others in the team 
• Provide continuing training opportunities to develop and grow subject matter experts 
• Demonstrate strong verbal and written communication skills. Be able to bridge the gap between technology and business process through the development of strong relationships between multiple functional groups. Above all, this individual needs to have strong customer service skills and a positive ‘can do’ attitude. 
• Attend training and conferences in areas related to job function to track trends in technology and best practices.