Job Title: Change and Release Manager
Area: Technology Services
Reports to: Manager of Technology Operations
Classification: Exempt
Location: Evanston, IL
This position is designated as Hybrid - Fully Flexible and expected to work from our World Headquarters office once per month to several times a week. The specific days in the office are determined by managers based on business requirements. Rotary is under the jurisdiction of Illinois employment laws; we require all employees to live within reasonable daily commuting distance to Evanston.
Organization Overview
Rotary is a membership organization that unites people from all continents and cultures who take action to deliver real, long-term solutions to pressing issues facing our communities and the world. Each year, Rotary members expand their networks, build lasting relationships, and invest more than $300 million and 16 million volunteer hours to improve lives and create positive change in the world. In exchange for hard work and dedication in support of Rotary’s clubs, members and other participants, and their humanitarian service projects, our employees receive competitive salaries, flexible schedules, comprehensive benefits, and job enrichment. To learn more, visit http://www.rotary.org.
Rotary’s Commitment to Diversity
As a global network that strives to build a world where people unite and take action to create lasting change, Rotary values diversity and celebrates the contributions of people of all backgrounds, regardless of their age, ethnicity, race, color, abilities, religion, socioeconomic status, culture, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
Overview
This position provides services and tools to various Rotary teams, with a focus on execution quality, collaboration, efficiency, and transparency. The two primary objectives of this role are:
- To assure that our various technology teams are following proper change management procedures, which serves the purpose of carefully planning changes, assessing and minimizing risk, establishing rollback plans and communicating with all teams who could potentially be affected by the changes.
- To provide and enhance tools that allow our technology teams to work in an Agile fashion and to promote collaboration across Rotary technology teams.
You will have the opportunity to plan, design and build tools and integrations that will help our various technology and product teams as well as our business partners and vendors to work efficiently. Your contributions will be essential in safeguarding our production environments and applications.
You Will Have
- A 4-year college diploma or university degree in computer science and/or 5 years equivalent work experience.
- Strong technical skills that may require in depth domain knowledge in order to validate release management and versioning.
- Hands-on experience using and administering Jira, Confluence and other Atlassian tools
- A thorough understanding of ITIL principles.
- An agile mindset in which you embrace change and transparency and seek continuous improvement.
- A DevOps mindset whereby you value and seek to enhance the collaboration across the technology and operations teams through automation wherever possible.
- A thirst to acquire an in-depth knowledge of Rotary applications and systems coupled with strong communication skills that will allow you to own the change management process start to finish.
- The leadership skills required of a technical product owner that will allow you to make decisions regarding the technical implementation of the business’ needs within Atlassian and the various plug-ins and integration points.
- Experience working with DevOps Tools and integrations.
You Are Good At
- Written and oral communication
- Facilitating CAB (change approval board) meetings
- Showing attention to detail
- Working collaboratively across many teams
- Translating informal requests into detailed requirements
- Working with requestors to plan, implement and validate changes
- Strong analytical and technical problem solving skills
- Preparing business-facing communications that translate technical changes into user impact notifications.
You Are Open To
- Adjusting to new processes and tools
- Flexibility to manage emergency and off-hours changes
- Proposing creative solutions to evolving business needs
- On-going learning and training in order to implement and support new Agile/DevOps tools as well as updates to existing tools
You Will Be Responsible For
Change and Release Management
- Facilitating the change and release management processes for all changes applied to any production environment. This includes code deployments, infrastructure changes, networking updates, database changes, license & certificate updates, OS version upgrades, application upgrades, etc.
- Conducting bi-weekly Change Advisory Board (CAB) meetings to review and approve changes and conduct post implementation reviews for emergency changes and other exceptions.
- Assuring that change management procedures are adhered to by all teams. This includes assuring that they’re logged, approved and contain necessary deployment information. It also includes making sure dates, times and assignees are specified.
- Working with teams to assess risk and to establish rollback plans in accordance with the documented change management procedures.
- Keeping the application workflows within our ticketing system in synch with the current change management procedures.
- Partnering with various business partners to establishing quarterly IT maintenance windows and code freeze periods. Communicating the change and code freeze windows across IT and ensuring they’re honored through our change processes.
- Reviewing pre-approved change proposals and managing the full list of pre-approvals.
- Working closely with product owners and IT colleagues to draft and publish communications for impactful changes. Communication methods include email, staff portal notices, Atlassian banners and My Rotary website banners.
- Sharing updates on major maintenance events in weekly all-IT meetings.
- Assuring that Jira releases are properly tracked, scheduled and completed.
Technical Product Owner for Atlassian Suite of Products
- Serve as an internal consultant and subject matter expert on all things related to Jira, Confluence and the other Atlassian products.
- Make changes to Jira projects and workflows as needed.
- Based on priorities set by IT leadership, work across all teams to plan and implement improvements to Jira projects and workflows.
- Troubleshoot issues raised by users.
- Monitor, review and act upon Atlassian notifications for licensing, user management, plug-in requests, security alerts, etc. Share product updates with affected teams.
- Vet Atlassian plug-in and integration requests received from various Rotary teams. Assess value, feasibility, cost, security and technical implementation requirements. Work with IT leadership to align on solutions and get approvals. Plan and implement approved changes and provide communications and training as needed.
- Be solutions driven, proactively sharing recommendations on plug-ins and customizations pertaining to the Atlassian suite of products that may address gaps in business processes and evolving business needs. Design, configure and demo changes to assure they meet the needs of our users.
- User management: assure that new users are getting properly provisioned through the Active Directory integration. Assure that as user roles change that their corresponding Atlassian rights are adjusted. Make sure all active Jira projects have owners defined. Via the onboarding process and workflows, make sure users get assigned to the right Tempo user groups for time tracking.
Leadership Attributes
- Communication: Be open to receiving ideas from diverse viewpoints and able to communicate messages so that they are universally understood.
- Collaboration: Builds partnerships and works jointly with others to meet shared objectives.
- Adaptability: Respond to changes willingly and recognize when to adjust based on the situation.
- Accountability: Have a clear sense of ownership and take personal responsibility for actions.
Why work for Rotary?
- Generous medical, dental, and vision benefits package
- Progressive 401k matching contributions
- Above market and generous paid time off package
- Tuition reimbursement
- Professional development opportunities
- On-site cafeteria and coffee bar with special pricing for Rotary employees
- Flextime-several different work schedules to choose from
- Close to CTA, Metra, a variety of stores, and many food options
Please note:
- Rotary does not provide VISA sponsorship or relocation assistance