Head of Applications and Platforms

Head of Applications and Platforms – Tachbrook Park, Warwick

Competitive salary with Excellent Benefits

The Tech and Digital team at Calor Gas are looking to recruit an engaging and proactive Head of Applications and Platforms

The primary responsibilities of the Head of Applications and Platforms is to:

Provide an application management service (AMS) for all application portfolios, including ongoing BAU support, management and optimisation of the 3rd party vendor and software license landscape

Establish and manage a continuous improvement capability that delivers against a monthly / quarterly release cadence, ensuring tight alignment between the feature release schedule and expected incremental business performance

Prepare for new initiatives impacting the application landscape, through any of the following scenarios:

• Application optimisation (simplifying the landscape)
• Introduction of new applications to the portfolio
• Significant changes to one or more existing applications

The role of Head of Apps and Platforms exists as part of a newly formed Transformation organisation led by the CITO. While the blueprint for the Applications and Platforms organisation is in place, the journey to define and activate the key roles, services and capabilities is still at an embryonic stage. Therefore, the prospective candidate will relish the opportunity to shape and execute the activation roadmap, working across adjacent teams in Transformation organisation to:

• Align expectations on, and inform the service / capability roadmap
• Identify and manage cross-transformation team dependencies
• Design and establish a standardised agile, continuous delivery capability within and across all portfolios, ensuring product owner and business process analyst roles (customer voice) are appropriately activated within the delivery construct

Key responsibilities will include:

• Continually refining the Apps and Platforms operate model, its services and capabilities
• Develop and manage the roadmap for activating the services and establishing the capabilities needed to meet the Apps & Platforms obligations to the Calor business
• Managing application portfolio teams to
  • Deliver a silent running BAU service
  • Continuously deliver business-prioritised improvements to applications, enabling business value to be delivered against a monthly cadence
• Holding product vendors and AMS partners accountable for meeting their respective service obligations
• Establishing architecture and engineering standards, enabling consistent, reliable, and high-quality application development
• Curating a catalogue or architecture patterns and engineering building blocks to enable cost-efficient and rapid development of new digital solutions for the Calor business
• Establishing a consistent, standardized continuous delivery capability, based on agile software development methods, across all application portfolios
• Establishing a consistent set of simple yet meaningful KPIs for monitoring the health of the application estate and continuous delivery engine
• Working across the Transformation Organisation and business teams to
  • provide a seamless internal customer experience
  • identify, prioritise, and plan technology-enabled process improvement demand
  • manage delivery of product backlogs arising from process improvement demand
• Identify, evaluate and recommend application landscape optimization opportunities
• Plan and own the delivery of approved application landscape opportunities, including resource, schedule and budget planning and management
• Commercial management, including the opex and capex budgets, ensuring tight control of spend against plan
• Developing and managing year-on-year roadmaps aligned to business operational and strategic imperatives
• Working with Procurement team to plan and manage the 3rd party contract landscape for both product and AMS vendors, including renewals and introduction of new vendors into the landscape
• Working with Finance teams to ensure the monthly spend against plan is tracking as expected and timely accruals submitted to circumvent budget leakage
• Managing the talent pool across Apps and Platforms, continually assessing
  • Competency against expectations and making the necessary interventions to address any shortfall

As such we would like you to have/be:

Essential

• Extensive experience building and leading multi-disciplined teams, augmented with 3rd party vendors
• Extensive experience of building and managing agile devops teams
• Extensive experience in planning, initiating and managing the delivery of complex, tech-enabled projects in both an agile and waterfall context
• Extensive vendor management experience, including contract negotiation, SLA measurement / tracking, relationship and escalation management
• Experience building and managing off-shore/on-shore resource pools
• Experience of leading teams to build digital solutions in a cloud environment
• Experience working with architecture & engineering teams to design and build standard architecture building blocks for the enterprise
• Experience building cloud platforms to enable rapid development of digital solutions based on standard architecture building blocks and loosely coupled architecture
• Experience developing solutions based on both SOAP and Rest API approaches
• ERP implementation experience
• In-depth knowledge and experience of Software Lifecycle Management, Software Release Management, budget, and resource management
• Experience developing and controlling multi-million £ budget plans
• Experience building credible and sustainable relationships with senior management and executive teams in a way that confers a high degree of trust

Desirable:

• Utility / energy sector experience
• Supply chain management experience
• Experience working with / knowledge of cloud analytics and / or AI platform capabilities
• SAP implementation experience

In return, we offer:

• 25 days annual leave plus Bank Holidays
• Holiday Purchase Scheme
• Private medical insurance (family cover)
• Company pension scheme (Salary sacrifice - single matched contributions to 4.5% for first 2 years, up to 7.5% after 2 years)
• Company Bonus
• Company car/cash allowance
• Discounts/Cashback/Offers from major retailers

To be considered for the above opportunity you must be eligible to live and work in UK