Senior Analyst - Capacity and Process Mgmt - IT Infrastructure

 Job Description

Job Purpose

The key purpose of this role is to ensure that there is adequate IT capacity management frameworks and processes in place, and ensuring capacity performance is appropriate to meet specified service levels. Communicating with IT teams about balancing system capacity and demand is a key aspect of the role in addition to planning and optimizing IT system capacity for current and future business needs. This person is responsible for supporting management in analysing, shaping and delivering the overall practice, sub practices, and results. The role is essential to the organisation and will be seen as an expert within their field.

Core Responsibilities

Research and Monitor Current Service Performance:

a. Collect monitored data associated with the organization's IT services, end-user devices, networks, servers, and storage devices.

b. Support management to ensure that the right tools and processes are in place to deliver effective capacity planning and performance monitoring across the organisation

c. Input to proactive prevention of issues by trend analysis, targeting support action and communication to minimize the adverse effect on the business of incident and problems caused by capacity and availability related issues in the infrastructure and to proactively prevent the occurrence of such incidents and problems

d. Regularly communicate plans and forecasts to internal stakeholders and review plans to ensure efficient resource utilisation.

e. Weekly, Monthly & ad-hoc reporting, capacity and availability related incident review on demand

Perform Capacity and Performance Modelling:

a. Identify trends that help predict future capacity requirements, and then build models based on those expected changes.

b. Support the IT capacity, performance and availability process

c. Responsible for analysis of IT capacity and support planning of capacity management for IT services in the organisation

d. Refine systems and methods to continually improve plans so that the organisation can better anticipate customer needs

e. Input to problem management for any performance related issues & provide solutions from the capacity and availability point of view

Analyse Capacity Requirements:

a. Evaluate the current capacity in the context of future needs, and then calculate the impact such changes will have on the business and IT services.

b. Operate capacity planning activities ensuring delivery against operational requirements which optimise efficiency of IT deliverables to the business

c. Identify and manage any deviations from the capacity plan that have an impact on the IT service deliverables

d. Collaborate with internal stakeholders to obtain and ensure that current and accurate information is used for planning purposes to meet IT operational requirements

Forecast Demand and Plan Resources:

a. Collate data from monitoring tools for capacity and demand, identify capacity constraints and provide analysis by reviewing data and trends to diagnose problems and concerns

b. Understand and anticipate the growth or shrinkage in demand for IT services, and then apply infrastructure resources accordingly while also reducing costs.

c. Assess existing capacity and develop operational plans and forecasts based on future plans for demand

d. Attend meetings and update others of issues and concerns, in particular when there is a risk of not meeting customer demands or where there are over-capacity concerns

Plan Capacity Performance Improvements:

a. Support and help develop the capacity management plan so that it satisfies the infrastructure and resource efficiency requirements.

b. Help define, create and implement best practices for capacity planning vision, strategy, policies, processes and procedures to aid and improve operational performance

c. Utilise knowledge and research methods to benchmark capacity planning activities and to deliver aligned to best practice results

d. Assess the impact of new change requests by liaising with stakeholders on product change requests and review/communicate the impact on capacity plans

e. Ensure that effective data, statistical analysis and performance metrics are available to internal stakeholders

Continual Improvement Management

a. Support the team and provide inputs towards continual improvement process documentation and process activities of Capacity, Availability and Performance Management and other ITSM related processes

b. Support the team with maintaining a continual service improvement process and tracker, ensuring scoped initiatives are prioritised, measured and reported.

c. Identify and help the team deliver improvement initiatives that optimise capacity and or wider initiatives to support IT service operations that ensure best return on investment without adding risk or disruption

Knowledge Management

Support the team with review of the IT Service management knowledge base and establish and maintain a knowledge management process aligned to best practice, to ensure the knowledge base remains fit for purpose.

General Team Audit & Risk Activities

a. Support audit requirements and compliance activities to the required standards

b. Maintain the company's compliance standards and ensure timely completion of all mandatory on-line training modules and attestations

c. Support tracking of any associated Risk Events, KRI's and other risk metrics specific to IT Service Operations and Capacity Management area. 

d. Coordinate for associated actions on an on-going basis by conducting regular meetings with action owners.

Experience Requirements

• Overall experience of 7-10 years' in IT infrastructure domain

• 7 - 9 years' previous experience in a complex corporate IT role is essential

• 5 + years previous experience of supporting the following is essential: ITIL Capacity and Performance Management, Forecasting and Capacity planning

• Demonstrable experience in statistics, forecasting and management information methods and techniques

• Experience of building capacity/forecasting models and plans and undertaking complex analysis to create information

• Experience of delivering results through cross-functional working

• 2 years previous experience working within a financial services organisation is essential

Knowledge Requirements

• Strong IT systems knowledge and skills including advanced Excel skills and the ability to learn new software packages

• Excellent knowledge and hands on experience with IT capacity, performance and availability practices

• Previous knowledge of banking applications (mortgage quoting, savings and lending specific) is added advantage

Skill and Competency Requirements

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills

• Strong communication skills to communicate effectively with vendors and stakeholders

• Highly developed analytical and problem solving skills

• Excellent attention to detail skills

• Highly developed numeracy, statistical and reporting skills with the ability to analyse, interpret and manage information, data and trends

• Project management skills are good to have

Required Qualifications/Certifications

• A Computer Science or equivalent technical degree or qualification (or 3 years + experience in a similar role) is essential.

• At least one technical qualifications (Microsoft, Cisco, Citrix, VM or another main player) is essential

• ITIL 4 foundation certified