Manager of Quality Assurance Analysts

Manager of Quality Assurance Analysts

Work From Home

Job Description

The work we do has an impact on millions of lives, and you can be a part of it.

We help protect our customers against life’s uncertainties. Regardless of where you work within the company, you’ll be helping provide protection and peace of mind when our customers need it most.

The Manager of Quality Assurance Analysts will work as part of the APD IT team under the direction of the Sr Director App Dev. This person is responsible for managing a team of quality assurance analysts that are accountable for writing comprehensive test plans/cases, test execution, coordination of UAT testing, and helping release management for several IT systems/teams. This person will manage the day-to-day performance of subordinate staff to ensure all projects and/or department milestones and/or goals are met. This person’s goal is to maximize the individual team members’ contribution, to drive the overall team forward in delivering IT goals. This will be done by quarterly goal setting quarterly, frequent one on ones and team meetings, as well as any other medium the manager feels is necessary.

In addition to managing a team, this person will need extensive experience planning, facilitating, implementing manual and automated regression testing, and managing the execution of test plans that ensure high quality releases within an agile methodology. This person will be critical for building out a highly effective manual and automated testing team and owning/adapting process for test requirements and release management. This person must have the ability to change and adapt in a fast-paced environment, as well as create and augment process to maximize team effectiveness.

This position requires strong analytical, problem-solving, leadership, and organizational skills, while maintaining a sense of urgency to meet individual and team strict deadlines and goals. This person must demonstrate leadership capabilities among peers and direct reports and keep a strategic perspective. Excellent oral and written communication skills are needed for effective collaboration with others, both internal and external to the organization, to achieve desired results. This person should show an inquisitive nature, seek improvements, and demonstrate strong accuracy and attention to detail. Other abilities include accepting responsibility and accountability for own job and performance, demonstrating independent work behaviors, and having decision-making skills to achieve desired results.

Responsibilities:

• Resource Management
• Manage a team of quality assurance analysts who operate in a cross-system capacity eliciting testing requirements, writing test plans/cases, coordinating UAT testing for several IT teams.
• Build and augment team and processes to maximize team effectiveness in manual and automated testing environment.
• Understand how to implement the company’s initiatives at a team and individual level.
• Work closely with each individual team member to develop goals that foster personal, technical, and growth development.
• Develop, implement and/or refine team metrics to continuously improve and move forward the team.
• Monitor performance, conduct performance reviews and develop/maintain development plans for each employee.
• Agile Service Delivery
• Participate as part of a team to mature Agile in an ITIL based service organization to increase the frequency, predictability, and quality of services delivered to our customers.
• Promote IT and Agile best practices to ensure alignment between IT and Agile standards.
• Develops and implement QA strategies to increase quality of releases.
• Estimate, prioritize, plan, and coordinate testing activities
• Analyze quality assurance processes; identify improvement opportunities to increase efficiency and productivity.
• Provide leadership by modeling excellence in high productivity, strong work ethic, and positive interaction with others.
• Collaborate with product owners and business partners as a subject matter expert in their assigned area(s) and share business and systems knowledge with others.
• Escalate critical issues, translate them into actionable remediation plans, and oversee through to resolution.
• Successfully navigate and mitigate conflict through frequent and transparent communication.
• Ensure applications are tested for correctness, reliability, consistency, and ease of use.
• Reporting
• Maintain detailed knowledge and clearly communicate testing status with agile teams, product owners, and business partners.
• At regular intervals, meet with, discuss status updates, gather information on upcoming initiatives and relative priorities of each initiative.

Work Experience, Education, Certification / Training Required:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience required. Master’s degree, PMP, CSPO, and CSM certifications preferred
• Demonstrated professional level abilities in driving culture change, process management, effective tool usage, evangelizing product technologies, and related application capabilities
• Demonstrated ability to communicate clearly, negotiate, listen, mitigate conflict, build alliances, and achieve results
• Minimum 5+ years demonstrated experience in Qualify Assurance work in customer facing environments.
• Experienced in complex business process, applications, infrastructure, and their use in IT solutions
• Typically, post-secondary degree, preferably in Management Information Services, Computer Science, Math, or Business-related field will substitute for 4 years of work and/or technical experience
• Certifications in industry-related or discipline-related organizations are desirable and may substitute for some work and/or technical experience. (Organization could include Scrum Alliance, LOMA, SILA, American College, PMI, IIBA, IIST)
• Minimum of 2+ years of management experience.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities Required:

• Experience/in-depth knowledge of automated testing applications.
• Sound understanding of software development life cycle and successful management of multiple full lifecycle projects is required, Agile experience is highly preferred.
• Experience/in-depth knowledge of business requirements analysis and IT processes required
• Demonstrate broad knowledge of multiple business areas, and industry to identify and communicate how IT solutions can support the achievement of short-and long-term business goals
• Leadership and negotiation skills, with driving desire and high propensity to learn quickly and develop oneself
• Ability to work with people to proactively identify and evaluate risks associated with business decisions
• Ability to communicate clearly, negotiate, listen, mitigate conflict, build alliances, and achieve desired results using strong interpersonal and diplomacy skills
• Ability to work independently, with little management direction, and within a team environment
• Skilled at asking questions and professionally challenging to uncover important facts and information
• Has the courage to make decisions, but also has the wisdom to know when a decision needs to be escalated
• Builds consensus among diverse groups of people; highly skilled at facilitating resolution across functions and departments
• Has the confidence to engage and work productively with business leaders and product owners
• Strong team orientation
• Strategic thinking and planning, delegation, and execution; analyzing, interpreting, prioritizing, and reporting pertinent information

Employee Benefits:

We aim to protect our employees’ wellbeing through a broad benefits offering. For example, we protect physical wellbeing through health, dental and vision insurance. We protect mental wellbeing through mental health benefits and an employee assistance program. We protect time away from work with a variety of paid time away benefits (e.g., paid time off, paid parental leave, short-term disability, and a cultural observance day). We protect financial wellbeing through contributions to healthcare accounts, a pension plan, and a 401(k) plan with Company matching. All employees are encouraged to protect their overall wellbeing by engaging in ProHealth Rewards, Protective’s platform to improve wellbeing while earning cash rewards.

Eligibility for certain benefits may vary by position in accordance with the terms of the Company’s benefit plans.

Diversity and Inclusion:

At Protective, we are committed to providing an inclusive culture where all employees are able to fully contribute and thrive. Our goal is to grow and develop our people, attract diverse talent and support strong, diverse communities.

We support diversity, equity, and inclusion by working to develop a culture of inclusion and belonging led by leaders who develop potential and embrace unique skills and abilities. Our aim is to create an equitable and accountable environment for all leaders and employees that will drive performance and impact business strategy. In this way, we can increase overall diversity for leadership roles and pipelines of talent by maturing our hiring practices, robust development opportunities and focus on retention of key talent.

We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer committed to being inclusive and attracting, retaining, and growing the talents of a diverse and inclusive workforce.