Vp, It Infrastructure Change & Release Management

The Vice President of Change and Release Management leads the team that manages all parts of the change and release processes. These include: ensuring proper quality of all deliveries, ensuring appropriate quality and hardening gates, driving proper automated deployment and post deploy verification steps, and driving proactive feedback loops to the delivery teams on opportunities for improvement. The VP must also drive organizational change with teams who create production deliveries. The VP will oversee the development of tools and procedures to complement and plug-in to the existing the ITSM model. Drives adoption of Change and Release Management across IT and partners closely with Applications team, Infrastructure, and the broader Application Production Support team to thoroughly define and document all application releases. The VP will seek augment capacity, speed of execution and accuracy using advanced Automation and Ai tools and techniques.

The VP will also oversee the Incident Management and Problem Management teams that manage processes to restore normal service operations as quickly as possible and minimize the impact on business operations for application-related incidents, thus ensuring that the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained. Drives automation of solutions to address day-to-day maintenance, administration, and reliability of enterprise systems and builds effective partnerships across IT to quickly resolve and prevent incidents.

The VP must also partner with the Continuous integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) DevSecOps teams to align change and release management processes and tools, to coincide with the CI/CD pipeline gates and execution approaches. This VP must also establish and drive maturity around error budgets associated to delivery teams, driving a DevSecOps culture of accountability.

The ideal candidate will possess a passion for automation and Ai within core technology workflows.

CANDIDATE PROFILE

Education and Experience

Required:

• Proven ability to drive organizational change with teams outside his/her direct leadership. This role requires negotiation and collaboration skills to affect change across Technology.
• Undergraduate degree/equivalent experience/or certification.
• 10+ years’ experience in information technology process and/or project management across diverse areas and technologies, with a minimum of 6+ years’ experience as a Director level or above.
• Well versed in automation and Ai tools and technologies. Thinks and drives automation and engineering first, in all that the leader and his/her teams do.
• 3+ years application support/change/release management experience
• Bachelor’s Degree

Preferred:

• Graduate degree
• Skilled in conceptualizing creative solutions, documenting them, and presenting/selling them to senior management.
• Experience applying measurement processes/methods for assessing program outputs and outcomes or progress toward goals and objectives.
• Experience with and knowledge of IT outsourcing activities in a managed services environment.
• Demonstrated leadership experience in influence and garnering alignment from external organizations
• 5 years in a technical discipline role with experience in planning, implementing, and evaluating processes, systems and/or initiatives
• Extremely high level of analytical ability with complex problems.
• Very high level of interpersonal skills to work effectively with others, motivate employees, and elicit work output in a team environment.
• Broad technical acumen across multiple disciplines applications with a solid understanding of current technologies
• Ability to command the process across all levels to ensure customer focus; including being assertive and self-starting.
• ITILv3 Certified
• Ability to work across organizational boundaries, to help lead and influence change
• Ability to align change management strategies with project.
• Proven experience, knowledge and demonstration of continuous process improvement.
• Proven ability to effectively prioritize and execute tasks in a high-pressure environment.

CORE WORK ACTIVITIES

Strategic Thinking and Execution

• Willingness to question the status quo, and find more optimal ways of operation including adoption of more advanced technologies and techniques
• Creates and communicates with key stakeholders effective process vision, strategy, process maturity, and overall direction of team.
• Drives strategic transformation of the change management function, to foster a global technology view of accountability in releases, continuous improvement, proactive and preventative actions for production protection, and any fostering a transformative culture in Marriott Global Technology.
• Ability to assess future state needs of the Change and Release Management processes and align existing strategy and execution to be ready for the future
• Action oriented in executing strategy

Develops Standards, Process and Tools to Define and Document All Application Releases

• Defines service release and deployment policy and planning.
• Leads the development and communication of reports on application release progress.
• Partners with all teams to define and document all upcoming application releases.
• Ensures Teams are Proactively updating Global Technology of Release Management plans. Drives awareness for key stakeholders, including business partners, of the master application release schedule.
• Drives continuous process review to verify that the Release Management function meets changing business needs.
• Ensures coordination of build and test environments teams and release teams. This can be done through self-service automation as well.
• Coaches, consults, and trains team to adhere to established Release Management procedures.
• Drives updates to service knowledge management system, preferably in an automated fashion.
• Partners with Change Management team to ensure that all defined releases are on change management roadmap.

Building Successful Relationships

• Acts as a leader and advocate of the Application Production support team.
• Collaborates with all Enterprise Technology delivery teams, to continuously improve processes and procedures.
• Liaises with vendors and Service Providers to select services and tools that best meet company goals.

Managing Projects and Priorities

• Develops specific goals and plans to prioritize, organize, and accomplish work for self and direct reports.
• Analyzes information and evaluates results to choose the best solution and solve problems.
• Plans, develops, implements, and evaluates the quality of the teams’ operations. Drives continued improvement in the teams’ execution.
• Supports achievement of performance goals, budget goals, team goals, etc.
• Thinks creatively and practically to develop, execute and implement new plans or programs. Generates and provides accurate and timely results in the form of reports, presentations, etc.
• Understands and meets the needs of key stakeholders.

Leading Disciplined Team

• Champions leaders’ vision for product and service delivery.
• Provides targeted and timely communication of results, achievements and challenges to direct reports, peers, and leaders.
• Works with direct reports and peers to develop and implement strategies and goals. Communicates a clear and consistent message regarding goals to produce desired results.
• Makes and executes the necessary decisions to keep team moving forward toward achievement of goals.

Managing and Conducting Human Resources Activities

• Utilizes an “open door policy” and reviews employee satisfaction results to identify and address employee problems or concerns
• Promotes the fair and equitable treatment of employees.
• Fosters employee commitment to providing excellent service, participates in daily stand-up meetings and models desired service behaviors in all interactions with customer and employees.
• Facilitates regular, ongoing communication in department (e.g., staff meetings).
• Promotes adherence to policies consistently, follows disciplinary procedures and documents items according to Standard and Local Operating
• Interviews and hires employees.
• Incorporates customer satisfaction as a component of staff/operations meetings with an emphasis on generating innovative ways to continually improve results.
• Solicits employee feedback.
• Sets goals and expectations for direct reports using the performance review process and holds staff accountable for performance goals.

Procedures (SOPs and LSOPs) and supports the Peer Review Process.

• Identifies talents of direct reports and their teams and assists with their growth and development plans.
• Conducts annual performance appraisal with direct reports according to Standard Operating Procedures.
• Champions change ensures brand and regional business initiatives are implemented and communicates follow-up actions to team as necessary.