Job responsibilities
JOB PURPOSE
• Working within a team of technical experts, support the provisioning of feature rich solutions to staff and users across the health and care system. You will aid the design, development, testing and operation of products in an agile manner with an appropriate technology architecture.
• A key component of the role is improving solutions and products to ensure they remain safe, efficient and effective.
• As technology evolves you will embrace opportunities to enhance the service offering by researching, piloting and establishing use cases to embrace leading edge solutions..
ROLE SPECIFIC RESPONSIBILITIES
• Build and maintain solutions and ensure our products are robust, performant, safe and cost effective.
• Ensure development management activities are automated including promotion through environments via change control standards
• Produce and present initial solution 'end to end' prototypes as working models for user evaluation and in preparation for full scale development and deployment.
• Select possible logical solution options using appropriate components and technologies suitable to form the architecture and system design and present technical options and recommendations.
• Provide support to client/customer solutions acting as a specialist consultant working to NECS processes and procedures.
• Maintain an effective solution architecture and operational service model that is scalable and agile enough to meet varying use cases.
• Support the development and documentation of quality standards covering all aspects of the solution development life cycle.
• Contribute to the development of internal best practice development methodologies, solution documentation and standards.
• Ensure that proportionate security and data protection protocols are incorporated into solution designs.
• Work within a DevOps delivery approach as part of a multi-disciplinary team.
• Support the deployment of solutions into a fully managed and maintained operational environment following appropriate release and change control.
• Ensure solutions developed meet requisite legal and industry standards.
Communications
• Frequent communication with data, IT and subject matter experts across the organisation and customer base ensuring developments are delivered to plan and operational system performance is maintained.
• Engagement with customers and partners to enhance the service considering evolving user requirements and other factors influencing the service.
• Liaise with customers and key stakeholders to manage changes to platforms both proactive and reactive as required minimising the impact on users.
• Communicate highly complex system architecture to varied audiences.
• Translation of complex technical/security/regulatory information to non-specialist users and provision of support in their understanding of the requirement on their systems.
Analytical
• Interpret, review, analyse, test and optimise solutions, capturing potential defects in the design or deployment.
• Constantly analyse and support complex digital platforms ensuring solutions are delivering to user requirements and any updates required via wider environment/market/technology change.
• Use sound judgement to model and analyse the potential impact of changes to solutions that may affect performance or the broader user experience ensuring a positive outcome.
• Analyse a range of highly complex system logs and audit trails to optimise system performance.
Planning
• Plan and lead on a range of complex work programmes, including for example producing new products ensuring plans are established, monitored and results reported, flexing where necessary to ensure successful delivery of the project.
• Ensure operational services have sufficient resource cover in place to meet customer demand and contractual commitments.
• Contribute to the wider operational delivery plan of the service with multiple activities running in parallel therefore appropriately prioritise workload under the supervision of the Principal Solutions Developer.
Physical Skills and Effort
• Operate in an agile manner as part of a virtual team in and away from NECS offices.
• On occasion work may be required to be undertaken beyond normal working hours, including some evening work when required to meet customer schedules and ensure the availability of critical platforms.
• Utilise a VDU for the full day with long periods of focus.
• Advanced keyboard skills are required as part of the role utilising shortcuts and hot keys to accelerate development.
Policy and Service Development
• Implement agreed changes to software solutions following publication of national guidance or policy in conjunction with Product Owners.
• Identify and implement opportunities for quality improvement to system functionality, processes and policies feeding into prioritisation discussions.
• Propose service developments that could deliver operational efficiencies or lead to commercial opportunities for the organisation.
• Ensure that the security of systems and the confidentiality of personal data are maintained at all times in line with the relevant information governance and technical security standards and policies.
Financial and Physical Resources
• Responsible for expensive equipment and specialist software and its maintenance including but not limited to installation, configuration, performance monitoring and troubleshooting.
Mental and Emotional Effort
• Frequent periods of concentration to identify and resolve issues with systems that may be intermittent or unpredictable.
Staff Management
• Responsible for coordinating the work of junior team members assisting in the prioritisation of their workload aligned with the objectives of the service.
• Aid in the recruitment and selection of team members supporting service managers.
• Assist in the training of junior team members as part of induction and development.
Information Resources
• Monitor the performance of software platforms in real-time against defined service level agreements ensuring performance levels are achieved and exceptions reported accordingly.
• Support the management of internal and external digital solutions contributing towards their design, development and operation and maintenance.
• Maintain detailed, regular audit and compliance reporting for all operational services to aid fault diagnosis and continuous service improvement.
• Deliver solutions that are 'secure by design' ensuring best practice standards are embraced and a high cyber security posture is maintained.
• Contribute to solution documentation including system requirements, low level designs, test plans and security policies.
Research and Development
• Responsible for contributing to the testing of new and existing solutions to identify faults or improvements in ways of working.
• Assess and evaluate new technology as potential business solutions with a defined requirement or use-case.
