Senior IT Specialist (Product and Platform Management)
Role details
Job location
Tech stack
Job description
The Agency is an "outward-facing" organisation, constantly interacting with its shareholders, the participating Member States, as well as with a wide range of stakeholders. It works in an integrated way, with multi-disciplinary teams representing all of the Agency's functional areas, to realise its objectives. Its business processes are flexible and oriented towards achieving results. Staff at all levels need to demonstrate the corresponding qualities of commitment, flexibility, innovation, and team-working; to work effectively with shareholders and stakeholder groups, formal and informal; and to operate without the need for detailed direction.
- THE CORPORATE SERVICES DIRECTORATE
The Corporate Services Directorate (CSD) provides critical business support to EDA operations by delivering high-quality corporate services under seven dedicated organizational elements, namely: Human Resources; Procurement and Contract Management; Finance; IT and Information Management, Security, Legal and Infrastructure. Additionally, the Record Manager is responsible for the effective management of information produced and/or received by the organisation.
CSD processes are geared towards efficient and optimal use of resources, leveraging good practice and technological solutions while ensuring sound financial management, transparency and accountability; outward focus and commitment to continuous improvement are the hallmarks of CSD., We are seeking an experienced and versatile Senior IT Product and Platform Manager to join our growing team, that contributes to the Agency's Digital Enablement Strategy to position EDA as a data-driven and AI-ready organisation, enhancing transparency and efficiency through a unified, strategic approach to data with a single pane of glass and security by design.
In this role, you will manage small teams to deliver services, collaborate with project officers and business partners to understand and anticipate their needs, and translate them into product requirements; define the product vision; create a product roadmap; oversee all stages of product creation; manage the product backlog and prioritise based on changing requirements; and use data to monitor and evaluate product progress at each stage of the process.
In your close collaboration with business stakeholders, strategic partners, solution architects, and other product owners, you will strengthen the client centric service delivery based on agile and lean principles, a cloud-first approach (SaaS and PaaS), security-by-design principles, and an IT business partner model.
We are looking for an individual who will bring a sense of client and product obsession to the team and who will ensure that our solutions meet or exceed expectations and deliver tangible business value.
Under the supervision of the Head of the IT, you will contribute to the following activities:
- engage with business stakeholders to fully understand their needs and challenges and translate them into viable product requirements and features;
- create product vision, product roadmap and maintain and prioritize product backlog and user stories based on the requirements;
- manage relationships with stakeholders and ensure alignment on product direction;
- drive efficiencies through automation and adoption of strategic platforms with built-in AI capabilities;
- foster business alignment and innovation through the Agency's IT governance (i.e. ITCC) by identifying, preparing and presenting the roadmap and strategic topics with key business stakeholders;
- identify enabling EU framework contracts and/or prepare specifications in view of realising agreed projects (e.g. for Agile runway services, feasibility studies, proof of concepts, minimum viable products, product scale out);
- overlook or manage project implementations, assess impact to end users including organizational change management to ascertain effective user adoption and that project outputs are well integrated in a sustainable manner;
- plan and execute updates and future releases through a data driven and agile approach;
- deliver regular status updates to clients, identify and address risks, and reflect changes in requirements and priorities;
- assist with day-to-day operations such as user request fulfilment (ticket triaging with a "shift left" approach), knowledge management (drafting of articles for first level service desk agents), evaluation of vendor performance (uptime, quality of feature delivery), technology scouting, procurement planning, contract management etc.;
- prepare, plan and manage externalization projects and services (e.g. managed services, QTM, T&M), including but not limited to defining service level agreements, coordinating all activities together with external counterparts, monitoring, auditing and reporting of the externalized services to ensure that the service level agreements are fulfilled.
Duties may evolve according to the development of EDA's structure and activities, and the decisions of EDA management., EDA, whose staff are governed by its own Staff Regulations, offers specific conditions of employment with regards to contract duration and pension arrangements., EDA will not accept any phase of the selection & recruitment process prepared or assisted, in whole or in part, by means of generative artificial-intelligence (AI) tools, including and without limitation to chatbots, such as Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (Chat GPT), or other language generating tools. EDA reserves the right to screen applications to identify the use of such tools. All applications prepared, in whole or in part, by means of such generative or creative AI tools may be rejected without further consideration at EDA's sole discretion, and EDA reserves the right to take further steps in such cases as appropriate.
If recruited, candidates will be requested to supply documentary evidence in support of the statements made in their application. They should not send any supporting or supplementary information until asked to do so by the Agency. Candidates are advised that part of the recruitment process includes medical analyses and physical check-up with the Agency's Medical Adviser.
Staff members employed at EDA require a Personnel Security Clearance Certificate (PSCC). The process to obtain a PSCC can be initiated only by EDA on behalf of the staff member. Failure to obtain the requisite security clearance certificate before the expiration of the probationary period may be cause for termination of the contract.
- DATA PROTECTION
Please note that EDA will not return applications to candidates. The personal information EDA requests from candidates will be processed in line with Regulation (EU) N° 2018/1725 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2018 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data by the Union institutions, bodies, offices and agencies and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Regulation (EC) 45/2001 and Decision No. 1247/2002/EC.
Requirements
Do you have experience in Power BI?, * be a national of a Member State participating in the Agency;
- be entitled to their full rights as citizens;
- have fulfilled any obligations imposed on them by the laws concerning military service;
- produce the appropriate character references as to their suitability for the performance of their duties (extract from the "judicial record" or certificate of good conduct will be requested prior to recruitment);
- be physically fit to perform their duties;
- have a thorough knowledge (minimum level C1 oral and written) of one of the languages of the participating Member States and a satisfactory knowledge (minimum level B2 oral and written) of another of these languages to the extent necessary to discharge their duties;
- have no personal interest (financial, family relationship, or other) which could be in conflict with disinterested discharge of their duties within the Agency;
- hold, or be in a position to obtain, a valid Personnel Security Clearance Certificate (national or EU PSC at SECRET UE/EU SECRET level). Personnel Security Clearance Certificate (PSCC) means a certificate issued by a competent authority establishing that an individual is security cleared and holds a valid national or EU PSC, and which shows the level of EUCI to which that individual may be granted access (SECRET UE/EU SECRET), the date of validity of the relevant PSC and the date of expiry of the certificate itself. Note that the necessary procedure for obtaining a PSCC can be initiated on request of the employer only, and not by the individual candidate;
- have a level of education which corresponds to completed university studies attested by a diploma when the normal period of university education is four years or more, or a level of education which corresponds to completed university studies attested by a diploma and appropriate professional experience of at least one year when the normal period of university education is at least three years or be a graduate of a national or international Defence College; or where justified in the interests of the service, professional training of an equivalent level.
Only diplomas that have been awarded in EU Member States or that are the subject of equivalence certificates issued by the authorities in the said Member States shall be taken into consideration. In the latter case, the authority authorised to conclude contracts of employment reserves the right to request proof of such equivalence., For native English speakers, your ability to communicate in another EU language will be tested during the selection process. To assess your foreign language levels, see: https://europa.eu/europass/en/common-european-framework-reference-language-skills, * a University degree (or equivalent academic degree) in ICT, Finance, Business, Engineering or other relevant field;
- at least 5 years of relevant professional experience, acquired after the award of the minimum academic qualification required as a condition of eligibility;
- proven work experience with business analysis and creation of user stories;
- strong presentation and collaboration skills with proven record of leading meetings and influencing stakeholders in multicultural environments;
- professional experience in day-to-day IT service management operations, such as incident, problem & change management, cloud-based endpoint management, and capacity planning;
- proven experience working with external service providers in a multisource environment;
- proven experience with the management of cloud platforms (e.g., M365 E5, Fabric, Power BI, Power Platform, Dynamics);
- a good understanding of Information Level Security concepts and their implementation in cloud platforms (M365 E5 security tools including Intune, Cloud PKI, Defender, Microsoft Sentinel);
- a very good command of written and spoken English.
(2) Personal
All staff must be able to fit into the Agency's way of working (see para. 2). Other attributes important for this post include:
- ability to work in a team and independently in their area of responsibility;
- ability to work effectively in a multinational environment;
- reliability and capacity to work under pressure;
- good communication and organisational skills;
- strong analytical and problem-solving skills;
- excellent interpersonal and negotiation skills;
- results-orientation and strong motivation;
- flexibility and innovativeness;
- genuine commitment to the Agency's objectives.
B. Desirable
The following will be considered an advantage:
- a good understanding of EDA's main tasks and functions;
- experience in establishing and implementing work plans and managing small teams;
- a track record of delivering successful business outcomes leveraging SaaS platforms (M365 / Power Platform / Dynamics) and/or implementing state-of-the-art cybersecurity safeguards (M365 E5 security tools including Intune, Cloud PKI, Defender, Microsoft Sentinel, Azure AD);
- a track record of modernizing Identity and Access Management with zero-trust capabilities by transitioning to SaaS (AAD / Entra ID Governance / Access Packages / Global Secure Access);
- hold a (recognised) professional certification in Service Delivery Management (ITIL 4.0);
- experience of leading organisational and process change.
Benefits & conditions
The pay for this position consists of a basic salary of 7.646,86€ supplemented with various allowances including, as applicable, expatriation or family allowances. Successful candidates are graded on entry into service according to the length of their professional experience. Salaries are exempted from national tax, instead an Agency tax at source is paid.
PENSION ARRANGEMENTS SPECIFIC TO EDA
Prospective staff members considering a career at the European Defence Agency (EDA) should be aware that EDA has its own pension provisions and is not part of the EU institutions' pension scheme (PSEUI).
In addition, EDA staff have several flexible options regarding their pension contributions at the end of their contract, under certain conditions, such as:
- transfer to a public pension scheme;
- transfer to a private pension scheme;
- direct payment as a severance grant.
