Release Manager - Senior

Responsibilities

Key Responsibilities:

• Managing the technical requirements to complete the testing stage and deployment stage, and work closely with the application development team, testing team, and production team maintaining coordination and communication between all stakeholders.  
• Collaborating with business owners to develop an annual release plan that maximizes the benefit of changes to business services to accommodate business process changes, feature requests, bug fixes, and upgrades to supported technologies and platforms.
• Working with all stakeholders to provide detailed technical documentation for the release planning, testing, tracking, release content, deployment, communication, and risk management.
• Capturing and managing requirements in the Agency's ITSM Tool (ServiceNow™) for release, sprint and backlog.
• Ensuring the allocation of Release Engineers and technical staff aligns to every release.
• Identify and managing risks that can delay the release such that the scope scheduled, and quality of the release is not affected.
• Validating all security requirements are being met with the release and no new security issues are being introduced with the release.
• Developing and a weekly schedule and communicating a monthly forecast of application and infrastructure releases to users for planning purposes.
• Developing new and maintaining automated test scripts to ensure they are up to date, reflecting the latest releases and new test cases.
• Planning for scheduled maintenance including security patching and emergency responses for database management systems and platforms in the production environment.
• Developing test documentation for major releases, such as Test Plans, Test Scripts, and Test Summary Reports and Test Summary Reports for minor releases.
• Performing load and performance testing, per major release and annually, for Priority Level 1 and Level 2 business services.
• Creating automated reports on testing tasks (e.g. requirements, test cases, execution, defects, recommendations)
• Implementing and maintaining tools to detect possible conflicts between various image sets, suites of software, and individual releases and updates, and creating a conflict report for each release.
• Scheduling the release review and change board meetings to discuss the release schedules with the team to identify roadblocks, if any.
• Leading the Go-Live activities and supporting the release management tools used to manage successful releases.  
• Monitoring new software releases and tracking current software version(s), and providing recommendations and schedule(s) for software upgrades
• Developing and deploying releases to accommodate minor business process changes, minor feature requests, bug fixes, and upgrades to supported platforms.
• Staying current on release, security patches and hotfixes schedules in alignment with agency environment and system changes/updates.
• Developing and delivering Application Release Reports per application per release, to include data dictionaries, system-related, regression test plan/scripts, updates to existing training materials, release notes, and deployment instructions.
• Deploying updated versions to the production environment in accordance with the agency change and release management processes.

                               *Contingent on Contract Award*

Qualifications

Basic Qualification:

• U.S. Citizen; eligible for U.S. Secret Security Clearance.
• 12 – 15 years proven experience in release management role supporting an enterprise Information Technology (IT) program.
• Demonstrated experience managing, planning, and scheduling the roll-out of IT services, updates, and releases to the production environment.
• Ability to communicate at a detailed and executive level on release related tasks such as plans, timelines, requirements, etc. between different teams.
• Experience performing Section 508 compliance testing using agency testing requirements (currently via AxeMonitor) for all major releases.
• Experience developing, updating, and maintaining system documents such as requirements, TAD, regression test plan/scripts, and O&M Plan as part of maintenance releases.
• Experience in working with DevOps, Agile, Scrum, Kanban methodologies.
• Previous experience in Dev/Sec/Ops Engineering developing continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines (CI/CD)
• Experience with of Infrastructure as a Code and the use of Application Release Automation tools
• Experience developing and maintaining SOPs and processes for Release Management.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the