Job Summary
The incumbent is responsible for leading internal teams and/or external service providers accountable for delivering operational support services and maintaining the performance, stability, and reliability of assigned IT services. The incumbent ensures operational excellence across service offerings by overseeing incident management, problem resolution, service request fulfillment, and operational readiness activities. The Incumbent is accountable for ensuring services consistently meet defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs), operational targets, and customer expectations. Through the effective use of observability platforms, automation, performance metrics, and continuous improvement practices, the role proactively identifies operational risks, drives service stability, and enhances operational efficiency. In addition, the incumbent manages vendor relationships, software and hardware compliance, contract renewals, and operational budgets, while identifying opportunities to optimize costs and improve service delivery.
Main Responsibilities
Operational Excellence
- Ensure operational execution aligns with defined SLAs, KPIs, and performance objectives.
- Manage stakeholder communication, ensuring alignment on outage windows and keeping business and IandT leadership informed on incident resolution progress based on criticality.
- Prioritize and manage incident and problem resolution to minimize business impact.
- Align technology capacity and performance with business demand while optimizing ex. cloud consumption.
- Ensure service continuity/DR readiness, including recovery and test plans to meet RPO/RTO targets, and ensure timely execution of tests and recovery activities.
- Ensure IT asset compliance (software and hardware), including license adherence, inventory accuracy, and lifecycle management.
- Ensure ServiceNow data integrity, including accurate service and CI mapping.
- Drive operational health improvements by identifying automation opportunities and optimizing processes.
- Provide input on tooling strategies, monitoring implementations, and technical debt management.
- Manage operational budgets for the ART and drive operational efficiencies across vendor contracts, licensing, and Cloud services.
- Oversee vendor contracts, invoice approvals, and XT account lifecycle management.
- Ensure vendors meet agreed performance metrics and KPIs, and review/approve exceptions as needed.
- Ensure compliance with industry standards, security regulations, SOX policies, and regulatory requirements, including TSA and Transport Canada mandates.
- Timely remediation of identified security vulnerabilities or risks.
- Participate in audits, oversee patch management, and enforce adherence to ITIL processes for operational excellence.
Delivery
- Consulted during business intake for operational cost estimation and during delivery for operational readiness of new initiatives.
- Define and validate operational transition requirements to ensure new or updated services are properly introduced and supported.
- Consulted on prioritizing backlogs and development efforts in ARTs including defects.
- Actively contribute to ART sprint planning to prioritize lifecycle and defect work.
- Provide monthly/quarterly overview on operational stability and performance in the ART/VS.
Leadership
- Partner with Human Resources (HR) to bring new talent to the organization by determining which skills and roles are required and making well-reasoned hiring decisions
- Provide a positive and welcoming onboarding experience to all new employees by ensuring they have access to the tools and resources needed to fulfill the job requirements
- Recognize employee milestones such as service awards and retirements, as well as significant contributions and enhanced responsibilities
- Focus on communications and foster collaboration by regularly providing updates to teams concerning ongoing initiatives and encouraging them to work together to accomplish common goals and learning
- Handle performance to ensure that employees who are not meeting expectations are identified and supported through the performance improvement process
- Create and enable a positive and engaging work environment by ensuring individual strengths are uncovered and leveraged
- Participate in succession planning via contribution to the yearly talent review cycle and identifying employees with the potential for management and technical paths
- Support professional development through regular career conversations with all employees, documented and tracked, and help them to reach their career goals
- Ensure knowledge is preserved through cross-training of key skill sets
Working Conditions
The role has standard working conditions in an office environment with a regular workweek from Monday to Friday and is eligible to participate in CN's hybrid work model. The role requires being available on call 24/7. The role involves managing priorities and delivering work within established timelines, with support from the team to ensure sustainable and effective workload management.
Experience
- Minimum 7 years of experience in technical support environment
- Candidates with an equivalent combination of education, training, and experience will be considered
Education/Certification/Designation
- Bachelor's degree in computer science
- ITIL Foundations Certificate*
- Candidates with equivalent practical experience, education, or training will be considered
- *Any requirement marked with (*) will be considered an asset (not mandatory)
Competencies
- We Care About Each Other
- We Strive for Excellence
- We Succeed Together
- We Lead Responsibly
- Vision and strategic thinking
- Impactful and inclusive leadership
- Performance and value delivery
- Empowerment and talent development
- Strategic communication and influence
- Managerial courage and decisiveness
- Customer service
- High-Impact Execution
- Conveying the vision
- Planning
- AI Literacy and data orientation
Technical Skills/Knowledge
- Will vary by area