Regional Data Centre Manager (Gauteng) at Teraco

PURPOSE OF THE ROLE

• The Regional Data Centre Manager is required to provide professional guidance and management to direct and indirect reporting lines.The Regional Leader plays a critical part in planning, executing and managing the strategic aspects for the region.
• The Regional Manager is responsible for ensuring that teams work together in delivering on the planned growth of the region whilst supporting environments in achieving the required operational stability and reliability benchmarks. Where feasible, the role will require active engagement across regions regional sites, leveraging central resources to assist in capacity building.

MAIN FUNCTIONS OF THE JOB

Data Centre Management

• Continuous evaluation of global best practices and share knowledge across all DC teams
•  Mentor Data Center Managers in order to ensure a smooth operation of the facility
•  Manage working methods to ensure that all SLA and MSA’s are achieved
•  Analyse working ways to highlight gaps and implement processes/procedures/methods/efficiencies to improve performance
•  Manages escalated support cases and leads appropriate internal technical resources and/or 3rd party vendors to resolution
•  Participate in important negotiations with key stakeholders and assist in negotiations with difficult customers
•  Ensure the effective management of data centre infrastructure to provide a concurrently maintainable, cost effective system supporting 99.999% electrical uptime, 99.99% mechanical uptime and 99.99% cabling infrastructure uptime.
•  Active participation in new data centre builds or expansions
•  Ensure that all critical components are monitored and that alerts are actioned with urgency
•  Ensuring comprehensive Root Cause analysis are completed for all incidents/outages
•  Ensure that records, drawings and schematics of the data centre environment/s are maintained and centrally stored
•  Develop and implement action-orientated monthly reports
•  Explore opportunities for partnerships across other regions and business areas
•  If H&S incident occurs, act in capacity of Incident Investigator and compile report for distribution on internal system and to Department of Labour
•  Aid in measuring contractor performance, weekly, monthly & quarterly meetings
•  Quick responses to potentially critical situations
•  3rd party vendor management and service delivery
•  Active involvement in network, physical and cyber security matters
•  Conduct service forums/reviews, hosting key stakeholders
•  Find ways to automate and innovate

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
•  Ensure that inter-departmental OLA’s (Operational Level Agreement) are met
•  ESG and related actions are executed and closed

Requirements

SKILLS REQUIREMENT

Finance

•  Develop, manage the regional budget and also provide input and make recommendation on the budget
•  Budgetary reporting
•  Timeous approval of purchase orders and invoices

Leadership

•  Innovate and make decisions on your own, but also know how to take direction when it is given
•  Ability to work in a highly collaborative environment including ability to influence and establish effective networks
•  High-level of Emotional Intelligence (Influencing skills, Interpersonal awareness, Resilience and Composure).
•  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 including training plans
•  Defining of measurable KPI’s for direct reports
•  Support and adherence to BEE targets when onboarding new resources
•  Diversify skills across the various teams while mitigating risks of key-man dependencies
•  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
•  Ability to create, manage and develop a team remotely
•  Attending weekly team meetings in order to provide guidance and to communicate points from Operations Management meeting downstream

Administrative duties

•  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
•  Ensuring All Incident Reports (Client & Non-Client) are updated, grammatically correct and ready for distribution and signed off daily

Client satisfaction

•  Work with internal and external stakeholders to align the business towards providing services that enhance client service and client retention
•  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
•  Managing all regional client escalations and ensuring feedback is provided to clients within the defined timelines and reports are submitted and signed off within 24 – 48 hours

Behavior

•  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

Information Security

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

General

•  Open to provide after-hours support as needed for significant issues
•  Excellent verbal and written communication skills
•  Excellent technical abilities
•  Proactive problem solving
•  Ensuring the emergency preparedness plan per site is updated regularly and contacts, resigned contacts and re-appointments are done

QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE

•  Electrical and/or mechanical qualification preferable
•  Cabling qualification preferable
•  Minimum 7 years relevant data centre experience
•  +7 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)