Job Description
Job Title:
Reporting to:
Digital Delivery Manager - DevOps
Dwayne Pascal
Details
Job Purpose
You will run a team of DevOps Developers, focused on maximising the workflow of all development
teams through greater automation and management of the toolset used for the development and
deployment processes. You will have ownership over areas like Continuous Integration and
Continuous Deployment, with expectation to maintain and improve those areas over time.
You’ll be adept at working with multiple project teams, breaking down barriers and pro-actively
engaging other teams to ensure they are making the best use of the tools and processes you are
defining for maximum efficiency. In this, you will be customer-focused and use analytics and data to
drive the prioritisation of your roadmap in alignment to business goals. You will balance the need to
deliver at pace with the requirements to establish secure process which are auditable and sustain the
integrity of both data and code.
You will be core to decisions that build high performing teams and be expected to continually develop
your team, creating a culture where small, regular improvements are the norm and people are excited
about their contributions to SLC.
Key Accountabilities
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Build a deep understanding of the departments digital service, ensure that processes,
technology and toolsets are built to support them and understand the dependencies
between projects and existing systems
Lead the collaborative, dynamic planning process - prioritising the work that needs to be
done against the capacity and capability of the team
Ensuring delivery of solutions that meet customer needs
Understand the agile project management methodologies in use and feeding your
improvements into the short iteration cycles, gaining
Build and maintain a culture of continuous delivery and improvement
Excellent knowledge of modern platforms and tools, using the correct product where
appropriate, especially open source and open standards
Leading a multidisciplinary team, ensuring they are working efficiently to maximise
throughput.
Ensure all products are built to an appropriate level of quality and there is a clear
technical roadmap which addresses performance, resilience and scalability
Lead self-driven skill development within the team, promoting learning events and
facilitating specific needs.
Essential Skills / Experience / Qualifications
Leading and Communicating
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Collaborate with staff and stakeholders and regularly undertake activities to engage and build
trust with people involved in area of work
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Confidently engage with stakeholders and colleagues at all levels to generate commitment to
goals
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Clarify strategies and plans, giving clear sense of direction and purpose for self and team
Changing and Improving
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Provide constructive challenge to senior management on change proposals which will affect own
business area
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Spot warning signs of things going wrong and provide a decisive response to significant delivery
challenges
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Encourage a culture of innovation focused on adding value – give people space to think creatively
Making Effective Decisions
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Analyse and evaluate pros and cons and identify risks in order to make decisions that take
account of the wider context, including diversity and sustainability
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Identify the main issues in complex problems, clarify understanding or stakeholder expectations,
to seek best option
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Make difficult decisions by pragmatically weighing the complexities involved against the need to
act
Managing a Quality Service
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Make clear, pragmatic and manageable plans for service delivery using agile programme and
project management disciplines
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Exemplify positive customer service behaviours and promote a culture focused on ensuring
customer needs are met through data-driven analytics
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Establish how the business area compares to customer service expectations and industry best
practice and identify necessary improvements in plans
Delivering at Pace
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Get the best out of people by giving enthusiastic and encouraging messages about priorities,
objectives and expectations
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Adopt efficient processes for maximising change delivery. Regularly assess how to remove
bottlenecks and improve the flow of the end-to-end delivery process.
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Review, challenge and adjust performance levels to ensure quality outcomes are delivered on
time, rewarding success
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Maintain effective performance in difficult and challenging circumstances, encouraging others to
do the same
Collaborating and Partnering
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Actively build and maintain a network of colleagues and contacts to achieve progress on
objectives and shared interests
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Understand other delivery techniques (Prince, DSDM etc) to join up with existing projects and
ways of working.
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Encourage contributions and involvement from a broad and diverse range of staff by being visible
and accessible
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Effectively manage team dynamics when working across Departmental and other boundaries
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Seek constructive outcomes in discussions, challenge assumptions but remain willing to
compromise when it is beneficial to progress
Specialist Skills and requirements
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Experience in delivering digital projects and products
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Proven experience using agile project management methods
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Proven experience balancing multiple priorities and dealing with ambiguity
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Sound understanding of the value of DevOps with knowledge of virtualization, IaaS, PaaS, and
cloud services being beneficial.
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Eagerness to learn and awareness of provisioning tools such as Docker, Chef, Puppet and
Ansible.
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Experience with Continuous Integration tools (ex: Jenkins, Go).
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Knowledge of scripting languages (ex: Bash, Ruby, Perl, Python)
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Knowledge of the administration of application servers and web servers for performance and
scalability beneficial.
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Excellent leadership and management skills
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Experience in leading multi-disciplinary teams
About SLC
Student Loans Company is a non-profit making Government-owned organisation set up in
1989 to provide loans and grants to students in universities and colleges in the UK. We are
responsible, in partnership with Local Authorities in England and Wales, the Student Awards
Agency for Scotland, the Education and Library boards in Northern Ireland, the Higher
Education Institutions and HM Revenue & Customs, for student support delivery in the UK.