Applications Support Analyst IT Careers – Barclays Bank UK
Job Title: Applications Support Analyst
Organisation: Barclays Bank UK
Duty Station: Kampala, Uganda
Reports to: Head of Service Management
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 Applications Support Analyst will be tasked with maintaining the availability and reliability of applications to ensure that IT can effectively meet service targets in accordance with planned business objectives.
Key Duties and Responsibilities:
Test Management 80%: Responsibility is to ensure that proper testing occurs for all Application changes released into the production environments as assigned to you by Line Management
- Work closely with Release Analysts
- Review releases and assign appropriate release testing tasks
- Compile and review the Testing Deliverables
- Conduct installation procedure tests
- Participate in functional, performance, and integration testing results
- Coordinate user acceptance testing
- Coordinate back out testing
- Conduct supporting documentation review
- Compile test results
- Conduct release test review
- Coordinate post release testing
- Validate and communicate results of testing activities
- Risk Management
- Build relationship with country IT Risk and Governance team and provide support wherever required.
- Contribute and deliver to the improvement of the risk profile by delivering improved governance, risk management, controls and compliance requirements.
People Management
- Responsible for driving own Performance Development, collating relevant documentation, preparing for and arranging reviews.
- By utilizing skills matrix, identify training and development requirements, formulating own plan to be agreed with team leader. Responsible for ensuring own plan is completed within agreed timescales.
- Undertake all necessary training in order to perform the role to the required standards, including gaining accreditation where appropriate.
Risk, Governance and Regulatory
- “Ensure that all activities and duties are carried out in full compliance with regulatory requirements, Enterprise Wide Risk Management Framework and internal Barclays Policies and Policy Standards. Understand and manage risks and risk events (incidents) relevant to the role.”
- Accountability: Facilitate a governance role
- Ensure that all architectures are signed off by Service Management architect in Service Delivery.
- 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
Key Activities:
- 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.
- Provide holistic 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 when needed
- Maintain an awareness of technology advancements and best practices that support application availability
Qualifications, Skills and Experience:
- The ideal candidate for the Barclays Bank Applications Support Analyst should hold a Bachelor’ degree in Information technology related field (An additional Business degree to an IT Degree is an added advantage)
- Subject Matter Expert Qualifications
- ITIL v3 Expert
- Oracle Certification
- PLSQL
- At least three years of banking experience
- Two years of experience in the IT field
- 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.
- 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
- 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
- Knowledge of user acceptance testing and change implementations.
- Experience in relationship management.
- 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:
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:
Barclays is an equal opportunity employer that recruits, develops and promotes people on merit, and rewards outstanding performance, regardless of background and gender.
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