Senior Support Technician at Tharisa

Role Context

• Analyse support trends to identify opportunities for improved service delivery.
• Create and submit daily and weekly reports on the Service Desk’s productivity to provide a view of customer service response times.
• Maintain various back-office IT systems and servers, enabling high availability and security of the Tharisa Minerals (TM) business applications.
• Maintain configuration and change management policies to ensure awareness, approval and success of changes made to the Configuration Items.
• Contribute to the development and improvement of support processes and procedures to enable prompt Service Desk support delivery.
• Request and allocate required assets and/or resources for the fulfilment of work objectives to guarantee quality outputs.
• Monitor the use of assets and resources within the team and own area of responsibility, to ensure assets and resources are consistently and appropriately utilised and managed.
• Provide staff with day-to-day direction and tasks aligned with Departmental procedures, to enable the usage of less resources more efficiently.
• Take part in the IT asset management by requesting quotes from suppliers, concluding orders, auditing devices delivered and preparing devices for usage, to enable efficient asset utilisation.
• Manage the retrieval of assets and peripherals for end-users, keeping track of assets and peripherals, to maintain an up-to-date asset database.
• Prioritise Service Desk tickets to address customer queries in the most efficient manner possible.
• Use an understanding of customer requirements and business objectives to provide input into how best to address customer needs.
• Contribute to improving customer support by actively responding to queries and handling complaints.
• Follow up with customers to identify areas of improvement. Proactively address recurring issues to enable timely and effective solutions for end-users.
• Use a solid understanding of computer systems, mobile devices, and other technology products to troubleshoot hardware, software, and network problems for internal TM clients.
• Provide instructions to a non-technical audience, using a technical background, to successfully guide the audience in addressing errors/faults or other technical difficulties.
• Monitor movements of the Support Technician team to understand whether escalation to superior is required to resolve issues as per Standard Operating Procedures.  
• Troubleshoot issues at newly commissioned sites on connections, by integrating systems and domains, to ensure smooth operations. Collaborate with System Administrators to resolve problems.
• Liaise with the Network team to set up the required installation and conduct network tests to support efficient operations.
• Monitor escalations from junior technicians, checking work completed against Service Level Agreements, to enable prompt support resolution.  
• Create and manage system permissions for end-users to ensure the correct end-users have system access as required
• Communicate with all relevant Departments on issues of the area of speciality. Liaise across the relevant Departments by engaging with the appropriate stakeholders to ensure all stakeholders remain abreast of Departmental objectives, any potential derailers are appropriately managed and duplication of work is avoided.
• Communicate with internal and/or external stakeholders, where required, to achieve work objectives and to maintain relationships.
• Collaborate with other IT teams to escalate and resolve issues that require specialised expertise.
• Lead the team according to Tharisa Minerals’ leadership principles and values throughout the entire employee life cycle (performance management, reward etc.) to ensure, inter alia, a high-performance culture.
• Coach and mentor junior technicians, fostering a collaborative and growth-oriented team culture.

Requirements

 Qualifications:

• Grade 12 (NQF4)
• ITIL Service Management
• Diploma (NQF6) in Service Management is advantageous
• Linux Engineering
• Microsoft Windows Server MVP 2015
• VMware Certification
• Additional certification in Microsoft, Linux, Cisco, or similar technologies is (an added advantage).

Job specific experience: 

• Minimum of between four to five (4-5) years relevant experience.
• Experience using Windows Server Operating Systems (all versions), Windows Server Infrastructure services, DNS, DHCP, IIS, Remote Desktop Services, Exchange Server (All versions, Email), SharePoint fundamental, System Centre Configuration Management, VMware.
• Installing, configuring and troubleshooting Microsoft.