Major Incident Manager

Our Purpose

We work to connect and power an inclusive, digital economy that benefits everyone, everywhere by making transactions safe, simple, smart and accessible. Using secure data and networks, partnerships and passion, our innovations and solutions help individuals, financial institutions, governments and businesses realize their greatest potential. Our decency quotient, or DQ, drives our culture and everything we do inside and outside of our company. We cultivate a culture of inclusion for all employees that respects their individual strengths, views, and experiences. We believe that our differences enable us to be a better team – one that makes better decisions, drives innovation and delivers better business results.

Title and Summary

Major Incident Manager

Service Operations play a critical role in delivering Vocalink’s UK Core and Ancillary Services to Customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The Major Incident Management Team form part of the Vocalink IT Service Management Function, within Service Operations.
The Major Incident Managers are responsible for driving and leading the restoration of Service issues and delivering the communication of incidents across our Business and Customer teams. The role includes owning the end-to-end Incident Management process and acts as the primary contact for all queries and escalations relating to High Priority and Major Incidents. The primary responsibility of the team is to apply best practice processes and techniques to ensure disruptions to resiliency, service stability and outage times are kept to a minimum and ensuring that a robust Post Incident Review process is applied consistently and effectively to reduce repeat incidents, drive reductions in MTTR (Mean time to resolution) and overall reductions in Incident volumes across Vocalink Services.
The Major Incident Manager monitors, facilitates and leads the Vocalink Major Incident Process (24*7) across VIL (Vocalink International Limited) and VLL (Vocalink Limited), ensuring that Incident details and supporting communications meet defined quality standards, contractual obligations and internal governance requirements. The role involves providing written communications to the Business (to stakeholders at all levels including Executives) through the Major Incident process, during the Major Incident lifecycle, until resolution. Chairing conference calls (Technical and Managerial) and facilitating effective Major Incident management through-out the incident lifecycle, in-line with agreed service definitions. Leading all Post Incident Reviews, writing all Major Incident reports and ensuring actions are defined and progressed through to closure and processes are enforced and adhered to.
A key responsibility of the role is to define, document and maintain technical recovery plans and playbooks which are key artefacts within the Vocalink Technical Recovery Governance Framework. These recovery plans are critical when managing any Disaster Recovery driven scenarios. Data analysis, trending and Management reporting are also key activities performed by the team.
A Major Incident Manager is a key contributor within the Operational organisation, demonstrating broad business knowledge, technical proficiency and leadership across Vocalink’s Business Services including (but not limited to) UK Core and Ancillary Services, Security, Engineering and Corporate IT.
Incident Recovery
• Responsible for the execution of the Major Incident process and associated tasks across UK Core and Ancillary Services
• Maintaining the operational integrity and service continuity by the management of High Priority P2 and P1/P2 Major Incidents through established channels
• Apply Best Practice Major Incident Management techniques to ensure disruptions to service stability and outage times are kept to a minimum.
• Chair conference calls (Technical and Managerial) and facilitate effective Major incident management through-out the incident lifecycle, in-line with agreed service definitions.
• Drive Service Management best-practice and compliance across the business.
• Provide clear and timely communications to the Business through the Major Incident process, during the Major Incident lifecycle, until resolution and completion of Post Incident Review activities.
• Responsible for measuring performance against KPI’s relating to Major Incident Management and performing the relevant analysis to drive improvement initiatives when required.
• Responsible for producing management reporting highlighting Service performance, identified trends and improvements.
• Lead on Post Incident Review (PIR) producing and maintaining Major Incident reports and accountable for ensuring that all Post Incident lessons are successfully implemented.
• Act a point of escalation for incidents from the business in line with the Major Incident escalation process.
• Be able to work on call 24x7 including weekends and bank holidays in rotation with other team members.
• Collaborate with and support the Customer Relationship Manager and Customer Operations Manager in ensuring the department retains the necessary levels of operational and support capabilities to meet its delivery obligations (People, Process, Products, and Partners)
• Ensure that ongoing ways of working are regularly reviewed for both efficiency and risk.
• Ensure ongoing Compliance with Contractual and Audit requirements without exception. Maintain appropriate evidence as required.
• Escalate Service risks through the appropriate channels if/when identified to ensure that exposure to the risk materialisation is mitigated or accepted as required by the Business.
• Responsible for ensuring that operational procedures and processes are regularly reviewed so that they meet the demand for any new services or changing business needs.
• Ensure that incident recovery is executed in accordance with all supporting Service Management frameworks and in accordance with risk appetite.
• Ensure timely escalation of qualifying incidents whereby Crisis Management engagement may be required.
Operational Resilience: Technical Recovery Governance
• Responsible for the creation and maintenance of IT Disaster Recovery (DR) Plans. Ensuring that each critical system or service have a Level 2 IT DR plan that highlights the system or service name, owners, SME’s, Primary and Secondary locations, Internal and External Dependencies, Resource contact details etc.
• Responsible for the creation and maintenance of Level 2 Technical Recovery Plans for Vocalink Services. These plans are used to understand the resilience’s that are built into each service and helps with the decision making for a DR driven scenario.
Operational Resilience: Scenario Testing
• Contribute to extreme but plausible scenario testing to assess Vocalink’s performance in relation to incident response strategies which aim to enable the organization to recover a business service within the defined ITOL. Tests are conducted in direct collaboration with the relevant RPSO to continually improve lines of communication/decision making, ingrain understanding of roles/responsibilities and Vocalink Operational Resilience via practical, real-life exercises.

Corporate Security Responsibility

All activities involving access to Mastercard assets, information, and networks comes with an inherent risk to the organization and, therefore, it is expected that every person working for, or on behalf of, Mastercard is responsible for information security and must:

• Abide by Mastercard’s security policies and practices;

• Ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information being accessed;

• Report any suspected information security violation or breach, and

• Complete all periodic mandatory security trainings in accordance with Mastercard’s guidelines.