Head of Application & Platform Support

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Head of Application & Platform Support

Department: Delivery & Practices

Employment Type: Permanent

Location: Any UK Office Hub (Bristol / London / Manchester / Swansea)

Compensation: GBP 80,000 - GBP 100,000 / year

Description

About Made Tech

Our aim at Made Tech is to use human-centred technology to improve our society. We believe putting people at the heart of designing, building and delivering public services leads to better outcomes for everyone.

About the role

As a part of our technical leadership team, you will enable public sector organisations to better use technology to improve society, and create experiences that benefit users across the UK. You will be responsible for leading a world class professional services practice; defining best practice, building and coaching teams, being a champion for Made Tech's managed service both internally and externally and evolving our propositions and practices.

Key Responsibilities

As a Head of Practice, reporting to the Head of Managed Services, you will work closely with our client facing teams to inform their strategy and ways of working. You will ensure teams are delivering to a high quality and are consistently showcasing best practice. You will work to ensure an exceptional employee experience, and that the team of application & platform support engineers have the skills and experiences they need to deliver for our clients and their users; whilst also considering their individual development plans. You will be responsible for defining the overarching technology strategy for the service line; developing new propositions to meet the ever changing client needs and introducing standards, tools and methods in areas such as platform alerting and data quality monitoring.

You will work closely with other Heads of Practice and Solution Managers to support the growth of the service line. This will include shaping solutions and writing bid responses, maintaining and growing your professional network, contributing to thought leadership through content and events, and collaborating with clients as an advisor, partner and consultant.

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

The below list describes specific skills and experiences that you'll need in this role.

Don't worry - we don't expect you to tick all of these when you join, we will work together to define learning and development objectives that help you meet these expectations.

• Key competencies
  • Strong understanding of ITIL ways of working
  • Strong understanding of software engineering practices
  • Strong understanding of cloud platform and data platform technologies
  • Evidence of proactive self-development and the development of those in their team
  • Ability to multi-task and confidently prioritise yourself and others

• Key skills
  • Maintaining a deep working knowledge of application and platform support methods, technologies and techniques - be a subject matter expert that guides account teams and client conversations
  • Excellent understanding and passionate articulation of the value of high quality application & platform support
  • Ability to innovate, understand the challenges facing the public sector, and apply learnings taken from the private sector
  • An understanding of the commercial position of working in a consultancy/advisory role within the public sector
  • A practical understanding of cyber security and data protection requirements as they apply to the public sector, and the ability to define governance that ensures compliance
  • Able to educate or mentor team members, colleagues and peers in the wider business on the offerings of a managed service capability
  • Line management and coaching skills
  • Oversee delivery and drive excellence across the practice
  • Confident ability to be a thought leader in the application & platform management space, both internally and externally
  • Able to build successful relationships with our clients and colleagues across Made Tech
  • Articulate value-add to clients and a differentiated approach through the development of joined-up propositions as solutions to client problems, and go-to market plans based on real-world client needs

• Key experiences
  • Growing and running technology teams in a live service environment; including hiring, developing, motivating and coaching a team to deliver lasting change
  • Developing technology communities as a leader or member of a high-performing team
  • Working directly with clients and users, and able to drive teams to deliver measurable outcomes
  • Designing standards for Level 2 and/or Level 3 technical support teams, including generating templates for key work products such as disaster recovery plans and runbooks
  • Implementing service management tooling and processes to improve the efficiency of live service support teams
  • Working in multidisciplinary digital and technology teams, including product, design, operational and testing roles
  • Solutioning and sizing teams based on complex client and user requirements, including capacity planning for continuous improvement activities
  • Working with sales teams to build client relationships, develop opportunities and win new work
  • Work as a trusted advisor across all levels, including building strategic relationships with C-Level stakeholders across the public sector
  • Analysing the cost and benefit of service management and monitoring tooling
  • Working alongside transition managers to define best practice for onboarding new digital and technology services into a live service support team
  • Managing partnerships and suppliers to provide a consolidated and seamless service offering to clients
  • Owning a cost-centre and of working with commercial functions to grow a profitable practice
  • Defining and implementing standardised approaches to maintenance including patching and upgrading

You can find the full job description, including its success measures on our open-source handbook.

At this point, we hope you're feeling excited about Made Tech and the job opportunity. Even if you don't feel that you meet every single requirement, we still encourage you to apply. Get in touch with our talent team if you'd like an informal chat about the role and your suitability before applying. We are hiring for this role directly, so will not respond to any CVs sent via external recruitment agencies.

Life at Made Tech & Benefits

An increasing number of our customers are specifying a minimum of SC (security check) clearance in order to work on their projects. As a result, we're looking for all successful candidates for this role to have eligibility.

Eligibility for SC requires 5 years' continuous UK residency and 5 year' employment history (or back to full-time education). Please note that if at any point during the interview process it is apparent that you may not be eligible for SC, we won't be able to progress your application and we will contact you to let you know why.

Our application process

This will include an initial call with a member of our talent team before following a two-stage interview process to meet some of our industry and technical leadership before a 30-minute call with our Managing Director - we're investing to make sure whoever joins is setup for success here!

Support in applying

If you need this job description in another format, or other support in applying, please email talent@madetech.com.

We believe we can use tech to make public services better. We also believe this can happen best when our own team represents the society that actually uses the services we work on. We're collectively continuing to grow a culture that is happy, healthy, safe and inspiring for people of all backgrounds and experiences, so we encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply for roles with us.

When you apply, we'll put you in touch with a member of our talent team who can help with any needs or adjustments we may need to make to help with your application. We've put together this blog as a resource to share more about reasonable adjustments and some examples of what this could include. We also welcome any feedback on how we can improve the experience for future candidates.

Life at Made Tech

We're committed to building a happy, inclusive and diverse workforce. You can get a sense of what it's like working here from our blog, where we talk about mental health, communities of practice and neurodiversity (as well as our client work and best practice).

Like many organisations, we use Slack to foster a sense of community and connection. As well as special interest groups such as music, food and pets, we also have 10+ Slack channels dedicated to specific communities, allies, and identities as well as dedicated learning spaces called communities of practice (COPs). If you'd like to speak to someone from one of these groups about their experience as an employee, please do let a member of the Made Tech talent team know.

Benefits

We are always listening to our growing teams and evolving the benefits available to our people. As we scale, as do our benefits and we are scaling quickly. We've recently introduced a flexible benefit platform which includes a Smart Tech scheme, Cycle to work scheme, and an individual benefits allowance which you can invest in a Health care cash plan or Pension plan. We're also big on connection and have an optional social and wellbeing calendar of events for all employees to join should they choose to.

Here are some of our most popular benefits listed below:

• 30 days Holiday - we offer 30 days of paid annual leave plus bank holidays
• Flexible Working Hours - we are flexible with what hours you work
• Flexible Parental Leave - we offer flexible parental leave options
• Remote Working - we offer part time remote working for all our staff
• Paid counselling - we offer paid counselling as well as financial and legal advice