Environments and Release Manager

The Technology Team provides business-as-usual, cyber security and project support services across the National Church Institutions, using a cloud-first approach and Microsoft technologies to support diverse business areas. The team is supporting a significant finance system transformation and requires dedicated in-house capability to plan, coordinate and improve the environments and releases that underpin successful delivery.

The Environments Manager will act as the key point of coordination between environment management, testing, release management and operational support. Working with project teams, product owners, business analysts, test managers, suppliers and service management colleagues, the role will help ensure development, test, UAT, training, pre-production and production environments are available, secure, representative and ready when needed.

You will manage the day-to-day operation and coordination of environments and releases, balancing the needs of multiple projects and operational services while reducing delivery risk and improving the quality of change entering production.

Key responsibilities include:

• Managing development, test, UAT, training, staging and production environments, including provisioning, refreshes, upgrades, patching, access controls, configuration and dependency management.
• Planning and coordinating releases across environments, maintaining deployment calendars, supporting release readiness reviews, and ensuring rollback, contingency and recovery arrangements are in place.
• Working closely with test managers and delivery teams to ensure environments and test data are ready for system, integration, UAT, end-to-end, regression, performance, operational readiness and training activities.
• Aligning testing milestones with release plans, identifying environment-related risks or issues, and supporting defect triage where configuration or environment problems affect testing outcomes.
• Maintaining governance, audit trails, standards, documentation and reporting for environments and releases, including compliance with information security and change control requirements.
• Managing relationships with internal teams and external suppliers, communicating clearly about environment availability, planned changes, outages, risks and dependencies.
• Identifying opportunities to improve environment stability, release quality, deployment automation, DevOps practices and overall testing effectiveness.

The role will be especially important in ensuring that testing takes place in controlled and representative environments, helping solutions move smoothly from development through to production and supporting reliable outcomes for the organisation.

• Experience managing multiple IT environments, including development, test, UAT, training, staging and production environments.  This should be in a Microsoft Azure/D365 environment
• Experience coordinating technology releases, deployments, release readiness activity and change governance.
• A good understanding of how environments, testing, release management and operational readiness work together to support successful delivery.
• Experience supporting software testing and quality assurance activities, including test environment and test data preparation.
• Strong planning, organisation, risk management and problem-solving skills, with the ability to manage dependencies and competing priorities.
• Experience working with third-party suppliers and building constructive relationships with project teams, service teams, technical specialists and business stakeholders.
• Experience of large-scale transformation programmes, SaaS or cloud-hosted applications, DevOps tooling, automated deployment pipelines, ITIL, Agile or PRINCE2 delivery approaches
• Clear communication skills, including the ability to explain technical matters to non-technical audiences.
• A commitment to continuous improvement, automation where appropriate, good governance and the values of the NCIs.