Below is an update on recent recruitment activity and resource flexing within Application Services
Quality Assurance
Matty Mathew was appointed as the NewCore QA Manager on Monday 6 March 2017. As this is a full time position Matty will come into Application Services following the completion of NewCore. In the meantime, we are looking to recruit a back-fill position for 18 months to ensure we align our internal QA and test strategies with NewCore. We are currently collecting and reviewing CV’s and will have completed interviews by the end of June.
Release Management
Since creating the release management framework we have seen improvements in how we plan and provide governance for application releases. However, it has been difficult to completely embed this operationally due to workloads and other priorities. To fix this we will be running a 6 month project to embed release management into BAU and to accelerate improvements. We have recruited Robert Spencer who is an experienced Release Management consultant to assist in this activity. Robert will be starting on 12/06/2017, please give Robert all the support you can.
Application Portfolio Management
We all know that we have a long list of applications that we manage and support. Some get a lot of our attention, others less so and a few are not understood as well as they should be. There is also missing information that we need, to manage our services, contracts, the relationships with our suppliers and to build an application strategy. As this is almost impossible for us to do while maintaining BAU I have recruited external assistance. Paul Waller will be starting on the 12/06/2017 and has a lot of experience and knowledge of best practice in this area. Paul will be working with us for 6 months to create an up to date application portfolio, collect all relevant documents and information and generate key review and decision points for our application strategy. He will no doubt need some assistance in completing this task so please give him as much help as you can.
Resource Flexing
We do an excellent job with the people and teams that we have. However it is not always possible to deliver projects and meet the Universities growing expectations using purely existing resources. We already flex resources and this will continue to be our ongoing strategy. However we would like to be smarter at doing this and look at the right mix of fixed term permanent staff, UK contractors, specialist suppliers and generic resource flexing partners. I am currently doing market research on what services are out there. If you have any experience of resource flexing and would like to share any lessons learned or success stories particularly from any other organisations that you have worked for, I would be interested in hearing them.