Major Incident Manager (Johannesburg) at Cisco

What you will do

• We make every interaction matter. We have a cloud communications platform at the heart of what we do which enables rich and engaging interactions that integrates communication channels and existing back-end business systems together to enable the orchestration and automation of all customer and employee interactions.
• You are a vital member of the in-life support function and will be driving teams in following processes necessary to incident management activities. You will work closely with NOC engineers, SRE, development teams, Client success, infrastructure and DB teams along with leadership to record, classify and communicate Incidents and coordinate efforts to restore service as quickly as possible. You need to develop and adapt existing processes to ensure we are efficient and that all teams that are involved know what’s needed from them.
• As an Incident Manager within in-life support, your success in this role is highly reliant on your ability to learn and know the fundamentals of the CPaaS solutions platforms and use your expertise to coordinate resources to resolve incidents quickly while effectively communicating updates to various partners, including senior leadership and command authority to drive issues to resolution and finish the processes required.
• You must also look to identify trends with reviews of incidents that have happened and work with the internal teams to drive preventative behaviour/technology and or process to prevent the same issues reoccurring

Who You Are

• You have experience operating in a high-transactional, 24x7 production environment and knowledge of incident management and ITIL/ITSM fundamentals. You have experience coordinating remote, highly diverse, highly technical teams. You are comfortable communicating with senior-level management, providing both high-level communication and technical incident reviews. You have been an Incident Manager or primary team representative in cross-team incident resolution efforts in a NOC or customer support role and thrived in that environment.

Minimum Qualifications

• You have atleast 5 years of experience with Incident Management, ITIL/ITSM, and have previously worked in a role focused on incident handling and resolution for customer critical services.
• You have extensive experience documenting troubleshooting steps and service restoration details; previous experience in a technical writer role is a plus.
• Experience creating knowledge-base articles.
• Experience in writing customer-facing Root Cause Analysis (RCA) documents.
• Feel comfortable bringing up incidents that are at risk of breaching an operational-level service agreement with a high level of visibility and highly technical needs.
• You are process driven and confident when leading or coordinating incident war-rooms with a large number of very technical or senior engineers and leaders participating.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills under pressure.
• Experience in communicating highly technical details in a simplified form to senior and executive leadership.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Major Incident Management is preferred.
• You value building interpersonal relationships and understand the importance of having team members who can rally behind an initiative together.
• You love learning and paying it forward.
• Experience in continuous process improvement cycles.
• The ideal candidate promotes and reinforces alignment to the process and policies associated with Incident Management.
• Knowledge on Software Engineering and/or infrastructure management on cloud environment would be advantageous.

Your typical day will vary, but this is what you will be doing:

• Manage incidents as an Incident Manager for all major incidents with specific reference and adherence to SLA commitments.
• Ensure incidents are worked promptly and with quality, and what can’t be restored is turned over to the next shift or escalated.
• Manage incident communications and coordinate support of cross-functional teams.
• During major incidents, be responsible for content to provide to Global NOC teams where customers communications are required (during and post incident).
• You will be a point of escalation for NOC teams and will be expected to be an active participant in leading major incident calls.
• After an incident has been resolved, facilitate an internal retrospective with members of cross-functional teams and write customer facing Root Cause Analysis (RCA) documents.
• Develop policies and procedures to enhance workflow efficiencies and ensure SLO compliance.
• Provide improvement recommendations across the incident management landscape to help improve and optimise how we handle major incidents
• Participate in on-call rotation for impacting incidents and critical issues where required.
• Major incident reporting production for both ad hoc and monthly requirements