What Title Would You Give This Position?
darkerosxx
Posts: 1,343Banned
Generally, in a environment where a company provides technology-related services that require a group that comes up with products and designs them, then hands them off to an operations group, what would you title a position sitting between these two groups that bridges the gap, taking the product and making it operations ready, so tasks like:
-Documentation (taking the design and documenting it from top to bottom so an ops group can manage it)
-Standards enforcement (ensuring the product meets operational standards)
-Ongoing life cycle management of the products (the long-term mgmt, not the day-to-day, so for example upgrading to a major new version of software or monitoring performance for required expansions/hardware purchases)
What title would you give to that position? Has anyone seen postings like this anywhere that I could look at?
-Documentation (taking the design and documenting it from top to bottom so an ops group can manage it)
-Standards enforcement (ensuring the product meets operational standards)
-Ongoing life cycle management of the products (the long-term mgmt, not the day-to-day, so for example upgrading to a major new version of software or monitoring performance for required expansions/hardware purchases)
What title would you give to that position? Has anyone seen postings like this anywhere that I could look at?
Comments
https://cognizant.taleo.net/careersection/1nacorp/jobdetail.ftl?job=273401&src=JB-11160
https://macys.taleo.net/careersection/macys_retail_jsa_career_section/jobdetail.ftl?job=1231012&src=JB-10420
NVIDIA Employment
etc etc.
-Standards enforcement (ensuring the product meets operational standards) Project or Program Manager, Product Manager in a functional environment. (Even a QA role potentially)
-Ongoing life cycle management of the products (the long-term mgmt, not the day-to-day, so for example upgrading to a major new version of software or monitoring performance for required expansions/hardware purchases) Product Manager
I currently work for company that collects, warehouses, reports on specific industry data. We also have a software products that are leveraged by our operations team and our customers. I am the liason between the operations team and the design development team. My title is business analyst. I could easily be classified as a quality analyst or data analyst as well. Next up would be solutions architect or business process manager, depending on how the role evolved.
In all the roles I have worked the PM managed the coordination of delivery until hand off.
Obviously PGM and EM are other titles that could/would drive this.
But I don't consider service transitioning as the responsibility of a project manager - any more than I would consider the actual testing, design, or implementation the responsibility of the project manager. I view project managers as facilitators and not implementers.
To me - in the real world - Service Transition includes activities such as ensuring adequate training to operations staff, actual release of the services, communications to customers, turn-over control, deployment and configuration into production, validation, etc. These activities don't tend to be skills that project managers would normally have - the scope can be broad.
ITIL uses terms like "Knowledge Management", "Release Management", "Asset and Configuration Management", and "Service Validation". "Change Management". But to me - those are just formal definitions for the activities that I mentioned. Those activities will vary and roles and jobs will depend heavily on the organization and the services being delivered.
Where I work - I call what @darkerossx is describing - change manager or release manager - release managers tend to be more hands-on and actually perform the release activities and are responsible for the actual transition to production.
Good luck in your job hunt!
@ratbuddy - yes - we have people with specific job titles that do that too
Training to the operational staff is usually led by the PM and defined by the BA or some other hybrid. Sometimes the functional manager or lead would take this responsibility. I've seen the operational staff send someone to spend time with the analyst or developer to document and learn the ends and outs of the new product. Sometimes there is no knowledge share at all except for some documentation.
I agree about the definitions, I have very rarely seen these classified as roles.
I agree that the last bullet mention from the OP has release manager written all over it.
***Back to the original question I think Release Manager for the win. Who knows though it could be any title you wanted to call it.
Sounds like a winner. Solutions Architect in my world basically means bad ass technicial resource who transitioned to the business and is even better and badder now in this role.
That has not always been the case though.
Anyways - that's just my view of the world - doesn't mean it works in all organizations. And I would think it would be very different depending on the business model and services being delivered.
@darkerossx - hope you don't mind that we are digressing from your topic.