Job Title:   Application Support Specialist (BA4) – 00193220

Organisation: Barclays Bank UK

Duty Station: Kampala, Uganda

Reports to: Head of Regulatory Affairs

About Barclays UK:

Barclays is a British multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in London. It is a universal bank with operations in retail, wholesale and investment banking, as well as wealth management, mortgage lending and credit cards. It has operations in over 50 countries and territories and has around 48 million customers. As of 31 December 2011, Barclays had total assets of US$2.42 trillion, the seventh-largest of any bank worldwide.

Job Summary: The Barclays Application Support Specialist will primarily support the implementation, maintenance, and enhancement of all Applications systems to enable the use of appropriate Platform technology, as an integral and reliable component of business process within country. Drive convergence of Technologies, ensure delivery of technology projects associated with Applications and liaise and negotiate with internal Customers and technology vendors.

Key Duties and Responsibilities: 

1. Business Support/Capacity/Availability Management 80%

• Provide holistic technical support of application availability to Business Users
• Take actions to achieve reductions in frequency and duration of incidents that impact application availability
• Ensure shortfalls in application availability are recognized and appropriate corrective actions are identified and progressed
• Take action on agreed appropriate actions with Line Management to maintain or improve application availability levels
• Initiate and coordinate actions required to maintain or improve availability of applications
• Act as a coordination point for changes to applications on a need basis
• Provide a range of application availability reporting to ensure that agreed levels of availability, reliability and maintainability are measured and monitored on an ongoing basis
• Successfully facilitate delivery of changes to reports needed by the business and ensure that reports and their dependencies are made available for the business.
• Maintain and document an awareness of technology advancements and best practices that support application availability
• Amend data anomalies resulting from system malfunction and service requests upon necessary authorization and adherence to the standard change process.
• Define and document e2e User Acceptance test plans as per function process in accordance with the Business requirement.
• To work with all IT managers and other teams to ensure the testing requirements are fulfilled.
• Actively participate in system change/releases/project meetings.
• Deliver team deliverables in quality and timely manner.
• Work with the business team to identify and resolve operational risks and gaps introduced by changes in the system to the business.
• Ensure logging, forwarding and tracking changes with the relevant Technology and Change teams
• Work closely with Release Analysts
• Regularly review releases and assign appropriate release testing tasks
• Conduct installation procedure tests
• Actively participate in functional, performance, and integration testing results

2. IT Rigour

• Ensure that an operational rigour culture is firmly embedded through the provision of regular awareness training and support.
• Ensure by testing / monitoring the effective and timely resolution of internal and external audit findings.
• Work in liaison with Compliance, Legal, Business Risk, Fraud Investigation, Center Manager and Team Managers to embed operational rigour, conformance, and share best practice.
• To carry out snap checks whenever called upon

3. Team Work:

• Build and maintain effective relationships with key players locally (Team Leaders and Testers), ensuring clear accountabilities for risk, compliance and governance, supporting Team Leaders in developing their people, maximising their potential, achieving business goals and feeding into Performance Development measures.
• Work closely and cross-sectorally with local country teams, Compliance, Legal, Fraud, and Business Risk teams and the offshore teams
• Ensure that all architectures are signed off by Service Management architect in Service Delivery.
• Actively participate in existing and new governance forums e.g. SIDF (Services Infrastructure Design Forum), TACC (Technical Architecture Control Council), IRPC (Infrastructure Replacement Council)
• Sell and motivate the implementation of service improvement plans/ initiatives.
• Ensure signoff of Service Management artefacts by domain architects in the regional office.
• Establish a mechanism for the measurement of stakeholders in their adherence to the defined Service Management principles
• Participate in the formulation and clarification of Statements of Requirements, and any subsequent activities such as Proof of Concepts or product evaluations, by managing, controlling and supporting the interface role between vendors and other IT departments or Business units as regards Service Management related technologies and services
• Participate by leading, managing and giving the Barclays Technology view and position in the negotiations between the vendors and Sourcing as regards Service Management related technologies and services

Qualifications, Skills and Experience: 

• The applicant for the Barclays Banking Job should hold a degree in Information technology related field (An additional Business degree to an IT Degree is an added advantage)
• ITIL v3 Expert
• Hold Oracle Certification
• PLSQL
• At least five years banking experience
• At least two years’ experience in IT exposure
• Possess good knowledge and understanding of banking (retail and commercial), core banking applications, IT Architecture, Change Framework and testing methodologies.
• An operational perspective and an understanding of how the testing team fits and contributes to the projects and the business changes.
• Hands on knowledge of testing tools, automated as well as manual testing.
• Computer literacy skills i.e. Proficient in “desktop” applications (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint).
• Strong management skills.
• Good project and release management skills.
• Strong team ethics. Whether functional, cross-functional or across different business and country, ability to create a friendly and focused team environment.
• Need to multi task in support of the resolution of complex business problems in different countries.
• Take full responsibility for own Performance Development
• Working knowledge of Retail, Corporate and all other products offered by Banks and the way they relate to available systems.
• Good knowledge of core banking systems.
• Good knowledge of the standard Change Governance Framework
• Working knowledge of user acceptance testing and change implementations.
• Past experience in relationship management.
• Working knowledge of working within a complex matrix management structure to deliver the end business objective.
• Policies and Governance knowledge within the Group and local legislation

How to Apply for the job:

If you feel challenged by any of the above positions, and believe you can deliver on key deliverables as outlined above, upload your application letter, current curriculum vitae and photocopies of academic certificate to our recruitment website detail below:

Click Here

Barclays is an equal opportunity employer that recruits, develops and promotes people on merit, and rewards outstanding performance, regardless of background and gender.

For queries contact us on 0417122453 or email: barclays.uganda@barclays.com

Deadline:  15^th January, 2015

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