Applications Solutions Specialist  

This role would support the Company's application management possesses and the necessary technical know-how for controlling and monitoring the applications. Candidate should be able to:

• Execute the Application Management processes of AFPI’s IT Service Management (ITSM) processes;
• Manage applications throughout their lifecycle (Requirements - Design - Build & Test - Deploy - Operate - Optimize); and perform in conjunction with the respective AFPI teams that are involved in the control, support and operating of applications;
• Provide application maintenance and support services in order to minimize work disruption caused by application issues;
• Investigate problems with software applications, diagnose root causes, and work with he/she necessary stakeholders on how to fix them;
• Identify errors and problem trends and for finding permanent solutions to these;
• Help with training and provide expert inputs and support to the organization with respect to the application systems used;
• Define application support standards and processes and writing the related documentation;
• Work with the business units to identify the functional and business process requirements for a change or a new application, gather business, functional and technical requirements and identify initial service level requirements and gather the availability requirements and understand the vital business functions
• Determine the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) in order to identify support/maintenance costs for the application:
  • Determine the expected longevity of the Application
  • Document a Maintenance Plan
  • Document an Availability Plan
  • Document a Service Level Management Plan
  • Gather the Capacity Plan
  • Fine-tune Plans to align critical organizational requirements to budget
• Work with the Team to understand the application as it is implemented, and the same time, look into how the application can be supported when it has been deployed to production;
• Understand the information (the data) processed by the application, understand the business rules governing the information, and provide the necessary expertise to gather, transform, and provide this information to business users that requires them;
• Work with the people handling the Release Planning for the application to ensure the proper rollout into the production environment of the system, work with the necessary Change Managers or act as the Change Manager in order to ensure proper training on proper systems use, proper systems support/diagnosis, and proper systems monitoring is performed;
• Work with the users of the system in order to monitor possible changes in operational or regulatory requirements that need to be addressed;
• Monitor service levels and measure application performance. When service levels are missed, work with necessary groups to address the application issue to minimize the impact to the business;
• Work with necessary groups to perform periodic reviews to identify improvement opportunities for the applications. Put together necessary plans and work with the necessary groups to execute/implement the improvement plans and monitor if the expected improvement impact is achieved.

• Gradudate of Computer Science or any related course;
• IT Service Management and ITIL;
• Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and various Development Methodologies, including Agile methods;
• General Knowledge of various Application Architectures (such as Service Oriented Architecture);
• Systems Analysis and Design Skills;
• Planning for multi-version releases is a plus;
• Programming skills is a plus;
• Database design and management is a plus;
• SQL experience is a plus;
• Application Development and Maintenance work;
• Change and Release Management;
• Incident and Problem ManagementStrong analytical and planning skills;
• Good communication and presentation skills;
• Excellent problem-solving skills.