Data Centre Manager at Teraco

PURPOSE OF THE ROLE

• The role is required to oversee equipment maintenance, inventory, customer service, contractor management and employee management.  Your versatility will be your greatest asset as you deliver mission-critical support and empower our clients to harness the full power of Teraco offerings.

OBJECTIVES MAIN FUNCTIONS OF THE JOB

Data Centre Management

• Responsible for equipment maintenance tasks such as managing and installing custom upgrades for clients, replacing cables, components and accessories
• Conduct working methods to ensure zero capacity incidents, and to maintain agreed PUE levels
• Ensure that records, drawings and schematics of the data centre environment/s are maintained
• Evaluate the best practices for design and maintenance
• Supervise a team of technicians to ensure smooth operation of the facility
• Manage working methods to ensure that all SLA and MSA’s are achieved
• Ensure that planned and corrective maintenance is carried out according to predefined standards and schedules
• Share knowledge and best practices across all Data Centres by building close relationship with other DC Managers and peers
• Expected to improve current processes, and introduce automation with aim towards simplification
• Manages escalated support cases and leads appropriate internal technical resources and/or 3rd party vendors to resolution
• Management of data centre infrastructure to provide a concurrently maintainable, cost effective system supporting 99.999% electrical uptime and 99.99% mechanical uptime. This includes capacity management of assets under safe operating design parameters.
• Management of data centre cabling infrastructure supporting 99.99% uptime
• Active participation in new data centre builds or expansions
• Monitoring and alerting of all critical components
• Ensuring comprehensive Root Cause analysis are completed for all incidents/outages
• White space capacity planning
• Quick responses to potentially critical situations
• 3rd party vendor management and service delivery
• Active involvement in network, physical and cyber security matters

Compliance, Audit & Risk

• Ensure compliance is maintained incorporating industry best practices
• Ensure data centre facilities best practices are enforced, maintained and improved
• Ensure data Centre cleaning standards are enforced and maintained
• Implement company and departmental policies, processes and work instructions as per the agreed quality and timeline/RFS
• Risk identification and mitigation
• Ensuring adherence to all relevant standards and policies
• Active involvement in all audits
• Strong adherence to process
• Ensure that inter-departmental OLA’s (Operational Level Agreement) are met

Information Security

• Identify and manage risks with regards Teraco’s information assets & systems. This includes risks in regards confidentiality, availability and integrity.

SKILLS REQUIREMENT 

Finance

• Forecasting of future spend
• Monitoring and managing of budgetary spend
• Budgetary reporting

Leadership

• Innovate and make decisions on your own, but also know how to take direction when it is given
• People management
• Active involvement with staff onboarding
• Guide and develop staff by working with HR to ensure skills, training and performance requirements are met
• Defining of personal development plans for direct reports
• Defining of measurable KPI’s for direct reports
• Develop and grow relationships with other business units
• Support and adherence to BEE targets when onboarding new resources
• Effective communication across all relevant platforms
• Excellent communication skills and ability to interact professionally with a diverse group of clients, colleagues and staff
• Interact with all levels of the organization in a professional, and tactful manner
• Provide guidance and mentorship to direct and indirect reporting staff

Administrative duties

• Scheduling of employee shifts, standby and after hour rosters
• Ensuring compliance with internal policies and regulations
• Change and incident management
• Ensure adherence to all established guidelines and management practices for employees
• Occupational Health and Safety responsibilities
• Reporting accurately, as per agreed format, quality and timelines
• Outstanding organizational skills, ability to prioritize effectively, and experience with technical project management

Client satisfaction

• Ensure client satisfaction by providing an optimal level of customer service, in line with company objectives
• Client support responsibilities can include, but is not limited to, client relations, responding to client inquiries and coordinating with other organizations
• Meeting of defined client survey and reporting targets
• Ability to understand client urgency and sensitivity of problem/incident/request

Behaviour

• Adopt a mindset of continuous improvement
• Lead by example
• Be on the lookout for constant process improvements
• Growing our people
• Delivering to our shareholders
• Respecting each other
• Embracing diversity
• Upholding the highest levels of integrity
• Serving our clients
• Highly service-oriented, reliable, responsible, self-motivated, and enthusiastic
• Ability to work productively in cross-functional teams or resourcefully and independently as an individual
• Focused on continued learning and self-development

General

• Open to provide after-hours support as needed for significant issues
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Excellent technical abilities
• Proactive problem solving

QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE

• Electrical and/or mechanical qualification preferable
• Cabling qualification preferable
• Minimum 5 years relevant data centre experience
• +5 years’ experience, managing teams, including line management, appraisals, performance reviews, hiring new team members, participating in disciplinary matters, financial management, etc.
• Extensive knowledge on Data Centre environments and critical infrastructure systems e.g. Cabling, Cooling, Power
• Experience of Data Centre KPIs (incident ticket related matters, time to solve tickets, physical security, infrastructure metrics, staff, safety, overall operations)