Lead Application Analyst - IT Services - 105813 - Grade 8

Position Details

IT Services

Location: University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham UK

Full time starting salary is normally in the range £46,735 to £55,755 with potential progression once in post to £62,728

Grade: 8

Full Time, Fixed Term contract up to February 2027

Closing date: 23rd June 2025

‘Open House’ Drop In Session: We will be holding an ‘open house’ drop in session at the University’s Exchange building, in Centenary Square, Birmingham, between 10am and 5pm on Friday 6th June 2025. If you’re interested in working at the University of Birmingham and perhaps have a few questions, this is an opportunity to meet colleagues in the Recruitment team. It will be a relaxed and informal event – you can drop in at any time.

Our offer to you

People are at the heart of what we are and do. The University of Birmingham is proud to have been a part of the City of Birmingham and the wider region for over 100 years, and we are equally proud to be recognised as a leading global university. We want to attract talented people from across the city and beyond, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success. We are committed to helping the people who work here to develop through our sector-leading Birmingham Professional programme which provides all professional services staff with development opportunities and the encouragement to reach their full potential. With almost 5,000 professional services jobs in a wide range of functions in Edgbaston and in our campus in Dubai, there are plenty of opportunities for you to be able to develop your career at the University. We believe there is no such thing as a typical member of staff and that diversity is a source of strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation, and debate. We warmly welcome people from all backgrounds and are committed to fostering an inclusive environment where diversity is at the heart of who and what we are, and how we work. Supporting our people to achieve a healthy work/life balance is important both to our employees and to the success of the University and, depending on the role, we offer a variety of flexible working arrangements. We therefore welcome discussions on all forms of flexible working. In addition, you will receive a generous package of benefits including 40 days paid holiday a year, one paid day a year for volunteering, occupational sick pay, and a pension scheme. We also have three high quality subsidised day nurseries. The University is situated in leafy Edgbaston and there are excellent transport links to our beautiful campus, including main bus routes and a train station on site. On campus we have a state-of-the-art sports centre with pool, shops, places to eat and drink, our own art gallery, museum and botanical gardens.

Background

Over the next decade, our aspiration is to establish Birmingham in the top 50 of the world's leading universities. That's a pretty big aspiration, and high-quality digital services and infrastructure are crucial to achieving it. In recognition of that, our Digital Strategy combined with significant investments in technology mean this is an exciting time to join IT Services, ‘making IT happen’ at the University of Birmingham. We want to attract outstanding, inspirational, and talented people, support them to succeed, and celebrate their success. It's our role to ensure that our community has access to accessible, responsive, resilient, and secure systems and support. What we do enables our students, staff, researchers, visitors and partners to confidently and creatively use digital services, technology and data for the benefit of their learning, teaching, research or work. The culture of IT Services is one of innovation, collaboration, excellence, and inclusivity, and we apply the principles of customer focus and continuous improvement to everything we do. We have an active People and Culture network, Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Women in IT group, bi-annual making IT happen awards recognition programme, and a superb Social Committee which arranges regular activities and events.

Role Summary

In this role you will be joining the Application Operations team which sits within Application Services. The post-holder will work with the existing service owners, most notably across Library IT systems. This post is ideally suited to an application analyst with excellent communication and interpersonal skills, proactive attitude and a solid background in application support, system implementations and integrations. The post-holder must have a good programming language experience and SQL, whilst an understanding of systems integration would be a bonus.

Areas where it would be beneficial for the post-holder to have knowledge and experience include:

• Knowledge of the standard IT governance processes such as data governance (DPIA’s), integrations board, design review and change advisory boards.
• Experience of service design, service management and release processes.
• Project management experience.

Main Duties

• Service Level Management: Work towards the existing SLA’s whilst looking at ways to improve service levels to the customer. The post-holder will make suggestions on how to improve service levels and will contribute to changes in departmental policy.
• Application Support: Maintains application support processes, and checks that all requests for support are dealt with according to agreed procedures.
• Incident Management: Prioritises and diagnoses incidents according to agreed procedures. Investigates causes of incidents and seeks resolution. Escalates unresolved incidents. Facilitates recovery, following resolution of incidents. Documents and closes resolved incidents according to agreed procedures.
• Customer Service Support: Monitors customer service and collects performance data. Assists with the specification, development, research and evaluation of services standards. Applies these standards to resolve or escalate issues and gives technical briefings to staff members.
• Testing: Designs and executes test cases and test scripts under own direction, mapping back to pre-determined criteria, recording and reporting outcomes.
• Change Management: Assesses, analyses, develops, documents and implements changes and enhancements based on approved requests for change.
• Release and Deployment: Assesses and analyses release components. Provides input to scheduling. Carries out tests in coordination with testers and component specialists maintaining and administering the tools and methods.
• Problem Management: Initiates and monitors actions to investigate and resolve prioritised problems in systems, processes and services. Determines problem fixes/remedies. Assists with the implementation of agreed remedies and preventative measures or proposes escalation. Will work on technical debt projects such as OS/DB migrations, service upgrades and application migrations.
• Actively manages equality, diversity and inclusion through monitoring and evaluation and actively challenging unacceptable behaviour.
• Supports the University’s sustainability agenda through resource efficient working.
• Any other duties commensurate with the grade.

Required Knowledge, Skills, Qualifications, Experience

• Knowledge of popular Library Applications – particularly Alma (Library Management System), Primo (Resource Discovery Service), Sentry (Access Control) and E-Prints (Institutional Repositories).
• Educated to degree level or equivalent qualification plus substantial work experience in a relevant technical/scientific and/or management/supervisory role in a specialist area. A higher degree may also be held. Where no equivalent qualification is held a proven track record of extensive and substantial work experience in a series of progressively more demanding and relevant roles will be required.
• Knowledge of general Academic Library processes and landscape highly advantageous.
• The ability to work effectively as a member of a team towards quality service goals and deadlines.
• Excellent communication, coupled with a strong customer service orientation, and the ability to tailor responses to specific technical and non-technical audiences.
• A proactive self-starter who not only finds problems but also solutions.
• Ability to prioritise and schedule workload in the face of conflicting demands.
• Structured and methodical approach to problem solving.
• A drive for root cause analysis and subsequently providing strategic solutions for issues/bugs.
• Knowledge of Linux, Python & XML is essential.
• Experience in Perl, HTML, XHTML, CSS, VBScript & JavaScript would be an advantage.
• Ability to demonstrate knowledge of protocols and standards relevant to Library IT (eg. MARC, Dublin Core, SIP2).
• Understands the importance of equality and diversity in the workplace.
• Evidence of literacy and numeracy.
• Ability to monitor and evaluate the extent to which equality and diversity legislation, policies, procedures are applied.
• Experience of web accessibility auditing and resolution would be very useful.
• Ability to identify issues with the potential to impact on protected groups and take appropriate action.

Informal enquiries to Jagdeep Biling, email: j.s.biling@bham.ac.uk

We believe there is no such thing as a 'typical' member of University of Birmingham staff and that diversity in its many forms is a strength that underpins the exchange of ideas, innovation and debate at the heart of University life. We are committed to proactively addressing the barriers experienced by some groups in our community and are proud to hold Athena SWAN, Race Equality Charter and Disability Confident accreditations. We have an Equality Diversity and Inclusion Centre that focuses on continuously improving the University as a fair and inclusive place to work where everyone has the opportunity to succeed. We are also committed to sustainability, which is a key part of our strategy.