1. Advanced Technical Expertise & Resolution

The Senior Application Support professional handles the most complex, long-running, and critical issues.

• Tier 2/Advanced Troubleshooting: Act as the advanced point of escalation for complex incidents that cannot be resolved by L1/ Junior teams. This requires deep, high-level knowledge of the application's code, architecture, and integrated systems.
• Deep Root Cause Analysis (RCA): Lead the investigation and resolution of systemic production issues. This includes examining database performance, complex application logs, network traffic, and code logic to identify underlying flaws.
• Data Integrity Management: Execute complex SQL queries or database changes (under strict change control) to correct critical data issues and maintain the integrity of production data.
• System Health Optimization: Proactively identify performance bottlenecks and architectural weaknesses. Develop and implement monitoring alerts, dashboards, and automated maintenance scripts to prevent future outages.

2. Leadership and Mentorship

Senior roles are expected to elevate the entire support function.

• Mentorship and Coaching: Provide technical guidance, training, and one-on-one coaching to junior support team members (L1) to increase their technical competency and ability to resolve common issues.
• Knowledge Transfer: Drive the creation and maintenance of high-quality knowledge base articles and runbooks for the entire team, ensuring standardized and efficient resolution procedures.
• Major Incident Management: Take the lead in coordinating response efforts during major system outages (High Priority/Severity 1 incidents), acting as the communication bridge between executives, support staff, and development teams.

3. Strategic Operations and Process Improvement

This level of role contributes to the long-term efficiency and maturity of the IT organization, often adhering to ITIL principles.

• Service Improvement: Lead initiatives to improve support processes, reduce recurring incidents, and drive down overall ticket volume by analyzing trends and identifying automation opportunities.
• Change Management: Review and approve production changes and deployment plans (patches, new releases) to ensure they follow operational standards and minimize risk to the production environment.
• SLA Ownership: Monitor and report on key metrics (e.g., Mean Time To Resolve - MTTR, First Call Resolution - FCR) and propose strategic changes to meet or exceed Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Operational Level Agreements (OLAs).
• Operational Readiness: Ensure that new applications or features released by the development team are fully supported (documentation, monitoring, and training are complete) before they enter production.
• Implementation Management: Act as the Subject Matter Expert (SME) during new application or major feature rollouts. Ensure the operational environment (support model, monitoring, deployment pipelines) is ready.

4. Interface with Development and Business

The Senior Analyst bridges the gap between the operational world and the development roadmap.

• Feature Advocacy: Proactively document common user experience issues and suggest functional improvements or minor code changes directly to the development team (acting as a proxy for the user).
• Requirements Feedback: Provide technical insights and operational constraints during the planning and requirements-gathering phases of new projects.
• Vendor Management: For third-party applications, manage the relationship with the vendor's support team to ensure timely and effective resolution of escalated issues.

Ticketing Systems: Proficiency with help desk software (Spiceworks).Microsoft 365 package: Proficiency with Microsoft 365 software (Power App – Power Automate – Forms – Lists – etc...)Education Software: Preferred to have knowledge of the education sector software like (Moodle – D2l – InfoCampus – etc..).Advanced SQL: Expert proficiency in writing and optimizing complex queries, stored procedures, functions, and views for deep data analysis, performance tuning, and data manipulation.Database Administration: Experience with database server management (e.g., MS SQL Server, MySQL) including monitoring, backup/recovery processes, capacity planning, and managing security permissions.Performance Tuning: Ability to identify and resolve database bottlenecks such as slow-running queries, poorly constructed indexes, and high memory or CPU usage.Website: knowledge of WordPress – CSS and able to support building or editing the Universities websites.Scripting Languages: Proficiency in a practical scripting language like Python, HTML, PHP, (Shell), or PowerShell to develop utilities, automate routine checks, create automated self-healing solutions, and handle mass data updates.Soft Skills: High level of patience, and clarity in communicating with users.