Change & Release Management Specialist

What you're passionate about

You understand that effective Change Management is about more than moving changes through a process. You bring sound judgement, strong planning and a risk-based approach to help ensure changes to APS’ production environment are well understood, appropriately assessed and implemented with minimal disruption. You’re comfortable bringing technical teams, vendors and business stakeholders together, asking the right questions and keeping complex change activities moving. You also understand how Change and Release Management work together to support production stability and successful technology outcomes.

As an IT Change and Release Management Specialist, you’ll play an important role in protecting production stability by coordinating change activities, assessing risk and supporting well-planned releases across APS.

A typical day for the IT Change and Release Management Specialist

• Lead and coordinate Change Management activities across APS’ production technology environment.
• Assess, prioritize and coordinate Requests for Change (RFC), ensuring risks, impacts and dependencies are identified and appropriately managed.
• Prepare and manage the Change Advisory Board (CAB) and emergency CAB processes.
• Coordinate technical teams, vendors and business stakeholders to support safe and effective implementation of production changes.
• Conduct post-implementation reviews, investigate unsuccessful changes and ensure required follow-up activities are completed.
• Maintain Change Management processes, documentation and reporting to support effective governance and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with the Release Management lead to coordinate release schedules, dependencies and change windows.
• Support release risk assessments, go-live readiness, deployment activities and post-release validation.
• Provide Release Management support during major release cycles and other operational activities as required.

What you bring

• A diploma or undergraduate degree in information technology or a related field of study is desirable
• Three or more years of direct information technology experience in a medium or large organization
• Strong knowledge of ITIL change management practices with working knowledge of release and incident management
• Understanding of Agile methodology development methodologies
• Practical knowledge of IT infrastructure and operations
• Functional understanding of the systems development lifecycle
• Excellent written and verbal communication
• Strong research and analytical capability
• Excellent project management, time management and organizational skills
• Strong team orientation and collaboration skills
• Hands-on experience with release planning and coordination
• Understanding of build and deployment processes
• Ability to manage dependencies between changes and releases