Location: London Liverpool Street
Closing date: 01/05/2019
Salary: Competitive
Employment type: Permanent
Department: Group IT - IT Operations

Job Purpose:

The Senior Collaboration Engineer will become an integral part of the BPP IT Infrastructure Team supporting day-to-day business-as-usual operations and current and future infrastructure project initiatives.

The Senior Collaboration Engineer will define, implement, uphold and maintain Active Directory, Azure Active Directory, Office 365, Cloud ser4vices and all the supporting technology such as AAD Connect, SharePoint, ADFS and SfB.

Job Background:      

The Senior Collaboration Engineer Role is a third line role and as such is the highest point of internal escalation responsible for acting on all technical requests, projects, and strategic initiatives, for technologies related to this role. Additional responsibilities include routine contact with appropriate IT and non-IT personnel from the BPP all group of companies. As needed, individual will act as expert level resource on reported incidents in the client environment including mentoring and the training of IT Operations Centre (ITOC) and internal IT staff.

Key Responsibilities:

• To lead/facilitate meetings and conduct presentations to technical and business staff
• To communicate technical concepts and proposals into understandable and justifiable business initiatives.
• To participate in the definition of specific technical design, product selection, device standardization.
• To proactively implement, update, maintain, manage, monitor, and support enterprise systems infrastructure.
• To perform change control on all Identity and Messaging infrastructure.
• To help lead IAM architecture and design initiatives with full documentation to ensure consistency, accuracy and supportability.
• Maintains technical overview of client environment.
• This includes (but is not limited to) incident / problem tracking, and ensuring junior engineers maintain delegated tasks in kind by mentoring and both technically and professionally.
• Researches problem information to proactively identify trends and potential sources of new problems while preventing the replication of issues within the environment. Acts as SME for escalated issues and questions from ITOC and BPP IT Team members.
• Through continuous review, ensures all open incidents for BPP are being worked to resolution; escalates any aged issues to management as needed displaying a sense of ownership and accountability.
• Works with clients to understand the business needs of clients to create solutions to fit their needs.
• Primary driver for development and delivery of project / BAU activity within the environments, ensuring resourcing and project management needs are met via delegation and guidance of peers, other members of the IT team and ITOC.
• Functions as the highest level point of contact in receiving client requests for resolution.
• Takes ownership of call and employs established automated and manual processes to ensure a complete, expedient and high quality resolution to client service requests.
• Provides technical and procedural support to ITOC, ISOC and IT team members via request or by initiating consultation in high volume situations.
• Provides research and documentation on major incidents and problems, developing complete documentation on impact and root cause of issues.
• Assists in the development of standard operating processes, procedures and policies in a dynamically changing business environment that will result in high quality and cost effective client service.
• Assists in the on boarding process as required.
• Assists management in developing/delivering training programs for the IT Team and Service Desk staff, including the population of knowledge-based systems (Service Now) with problem resolution tips and best practices.
• Responsible for maintaining and improving department performance through mentoring of personnel. Involvement in long-term planning, continual process improvement initiatives.
• To evaluate and anticipate the impact of technical solutions related to assigned projects.
• Authors and/or participates in the creation of technology documents and white papers that address and communicate domain specific architecture and design, concepts, and strategic direction.
• To provide consultation to developers, architects, engineers and business stakeholders.
• To define performance requirements for technology solutions. 
• To identify, analyse and enhance technical designs to address potential performance issues. 
• To perform scalability and sizing assessments.
• To define and compile a reporting framework for projects, incidents and changes in-line with KPI’s and SLA set

Skills:

It is essential that candidates possess the following skills and competencies

• Achieving Results – Be aware of key business objectives, and ensure these are applied appropriately to all business activities.
• Building Relationships – Able to develop effective relationships with all BPP and client staff, and be recognised as providing a supporting role.
• Commercial and Business Awareness – Able to balance the financial, quality, people and customer expectation related risks.
• Customer Focus (internal & external) – Able to anticipate and understand customer expectations, and ensure customer requirements are met and expectations appropriately managed. Able to build partner relationships with customers, and focus on solving their problems.
• Communication – Effective communication skills suitable for the management of and liaison with departmental staff and senior management, both on a one to one and one to many, basis. Demonstrate effective communication, both orally and in writing, with subordinates, colleagues, clients and customers including producing reports, preparing, organising and delivering presentations using appropriate tools and techniques, and taking a leading role in meetings and discussions.
• Planning and Organising – Effective at determining a course of action by breaking it down into smaller steps and by planning and resourcing each of these, making allowance for potential problems. Must manage the field of responsibility within allocated budgets, and be able to plan and forecast future budgets based on business priorities.
• Project Management – Be able to manage delivery of Network related projects whether as network specific and/or as part of other IT and/or business projects
• Understanding BPP objectives – Aware of BPP strategies, policies and procedures. Aware of how the organisation operates.
• Teamwork – Able to contribute effectively towards the objectives of a team, and be able to share knowledge, ideas and information. Aware of the needs, objectives and constraints of those in other disciplines and functions.
• Problem Solving and Decision Making – Able to solve problems in a measured and creative way. Capable of independently assessing a wide variety of tasks, and be proactive in relation to identifying and undertaking activities that are to the benefit of the business. Able to balance long and short term objectives, and understand business value. Be responsible for own decisions.
• Influencing and Impact – Act in a professional manner, and exhibit the required behavior that should act as an example to other employees. Needs to delegate tasks, responsibilities and authorities effectively. Effective at identifying goals and objectives, and motivating and leading others towards their achievement. Able to network throughout the wider IT community.
• Innovation, Flexibility and Adaptability – Undertake tasks with a positive attitude and respond well to management and client requests. Working locations may include a variety of BPP locations. Must be prepared to meet business goals and respond well to change.

Qualifications:

• MCSA Office 365 – Advantageous
• MCSE (Productivity) – Advantageous
• Microsoft 365 Certified: Messaging Administrator Associate – Advantageous
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Security Engineer Associate – Advantageous
• ITIL Foundation - Advantageous

Knowledge/Experience - please refer to the full job description

Senior Collaboration Engineer