City of Tampa

This is highly responsible supervisory and technical work in supervising shift operations and functions supporting centralized and distributed data processing including a Help Desk and Service Center.

An employee in this class supervises data center staff for the city and is responsible for ensuring maximum utilization of personnel and equipment while meeting production schedules and requirements. Additionally, the employee is responsible for monitoring and supervising a Help Desk and Service Center that provides a single point of contact for the referral of technical problems and service requests by city computer users. Under direction, responsibilities of the employee include assigning, supervising, reviewing, and participating in computer operation activities and providing guidance and assistance to staff in solving difficult technical problems. Tasks are of considerable difficulty and include such personnel activities as training operations/ help desk analysts, evaluating employee performance, and developing work schedules to maintain necessary computer center/network coverage for a 7 day, 24 hour environment. The exercise of considerable initiative and independent judgment is required in supervising work activities, ensuring adequate shift coverage, and monitoring production systems. Work is reviewed while in progress and upon completion through observation, conferences, reports submitted, and results obtained.

Computer Operations Services: Supervises staff engaged in operating and monitoring a complex, multi-platform computer center, prioritizes jobs to optimize system use; ensures that scheduled jobs are entered into system for processing; coordinates scheduling for special job requests; reviews jobs for completeness and correctness in terms of expected output; confers with and recommends changes to users (i.e. programmers, analysts, or customers) to identify and resolve processing problems; provides staff with special information about processing procedures and system processing requirements; answers staff questions regarding status of system requests or equipment malfunction; keeps daily log of production problems; changes systems scripts or job control language (JCL) according to specifications so system requests can be processed properly; ensures that system backups and requested data and system restorations are completed and disaster recovery procedures are followed; reviews work to assure that operations standards and procedures are followed.

Help Desk Supervision: supervises staff to ensure that customer calls for service are logged, resolved and routed appropriately for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level support, directs staff activities involving preliminary efforts to fix technical problems presented by users; supervises staff activities in logging and tracking hardware maintenance service requests, maintaining user profiles and asset management information, and providing basic information for customers such as agency hours, telephone numbers, etc.; provides training for, and instructs, staff in the use of help desk procedures; develops and coordinates staff schedules for shift coverage of help desk and to ensure on call coverage availability on weekends to monitor problems that occur in computer systems, including police and fire emergency response networks.

System Software/Hardware Maintenance and Documentation: provides technical assistance in the planning, design and implementation of major computer systems; assists in the development of standards and procedures for quality control of data processing and network operations; monitors performance to ensure that city systems and networks are functioning properly and efficiently; ensures that all operations management computer software, job scheduling, tape management, console management, report distribution, other relevant software and hardware is implemented properly and that documentation is current; makes periodic audits of computer center and related areas in order to identify and correct any supply, hardware, software or personnel problem; ensures vendors are contacted to correct computer or service problems; may install successive generations of system software and utilities used by the data center to manage systems.

Staff Supervision: assigns and schedules subordinates’ work; plans and develops shift assignments to insure proper coverage for various shifts 7 days 24 hours a day; schedules on-call weekend coverage to monitor problems for city mission critical systems and networks; including police and fire emergency response networks; reschedules and reassigns personnel as conditions warrant; instructs, motivates, develops, and evaluates staff; serves as liaison between Operations/Help Desk analysts and other teams, city computer users, and vendors; discusses problems with subordinates, supervisor, and related teams to identify solutions or new procedures.

Performs related work as required.

Extensive knowledge of: methods, equipment and procedures employed in computer operations; mainframe, mini and micro and network computer operating systems, hardware and peripheral device operations, and operations related software; job control and system languages and third party products such as job scheduling, tape management, report distribution, and automated operations.

Considerable knowledge of: computer center activities, standard Help Desk troubleshooting techniques, good customer service processes, and relationships between computer operations and other organizational components.

Working knowledge of: effective supervisory and technical documentation techniques.

Ability to: plan, assign, and schedule the work of employees in a manner that promotes full performance; analyze computer operational problems; establish and maintain effective working relationships with others; explain moderately complex ideas and problems; talk clients through solutions to computer problems over the phone; physically perform operations-related tasks such as lifting cartons of paper (up to approximately 50 pounds).

Skill in: diagnosing, documenting and explaining employee performance deficiencies and development needs.

Graduation from an accredited college or university with a bachelor's degree in computer science or related field and one (1) year of experience in personal computers and networking, including six (6) months supervisory experience; or an equivalent combination of training and experience.

During periods when the Mayor issues an emergency declaration for the City of Tampa, all employees may be required to work in preparation, response or recovery activities related to the stated emergency.