Issue Consultant | Torchora

🎯 Role Definition

The Issue Consultant is responsible for managing end-to-end issue and incident lifecycle processes, ensuring timely escalation and remediation, performing deep root cause analysis, and implementing sustainable corrective and preventive actions. This role partners with cross-functional teams — engineering, product, operations, legal and compliance — to translate incident data into process improvements, risk mitigation strategies and governance artifacts. The Issue Consultant also designs and owns reporting on KPIs such as Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), incident recurrence rate and CAPA closure quality.

Core keywords: Issue Management, Incident Response, Root Cause Analysis (RCA), CAPA, ITIL, ServiceNow, Jira, Problem Management, Escalation Management, Process Improvement, Risk Mitigation, KPI Reporting.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Incident Analyst / Incident Coordinator
Problem Management Analyst
IT Support Manager or Operations Analyst

Advancement To:

Senior Issue Consultant / Lead Problem Manager
Incident Response Manager / Head of Problem Management
Director of Risk & Resilience or Head of Operational Excellence

Lateral Moves:

Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery Specialist
Compliance & Controls Consultant
Continuous Improvement / Lean Six Sigma Consultant

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Lead end-to-end issue lifecycle management for high-severity incidents, coordinating detection, triage, cross-functional escalation, resolution, and post-incident review to minimize business impact and ensure timely communication with stakeholders and executive leadership.
Conduct structured root cause analysis (RCA) using industry-standard techniques (5 Whys, Fishbone, Fault Tree Analysis) to identify systemic causes and create actionable CAPA plans with owners, timelines, and verification criteria.
Design, implement and maintain incident and problem management frameworks aligned to ITIL and enterprise risk management practices; establish clear escalation paths, roles and responsibilities across engineering, operations, and product teams.
Own issue tracking and case management tooling (ServiceNow, JIRA, Remedy): define workflows, automation rules, incident templates, SLA enforcement, and dashboarding to ensure data quality and operational efficiency.
Drive continuous improvement by analyzing incident trends, recurring failure patterns and near-miss events; prioritize remediation initiatives and quantify expected reduction in incidents and operational cost avoidance.
Partner with engineering and product teams to translate incident findings into technical requirements, release gating criteria and verification steps that prevent recurrence and improve system resilience.
Develop and maintain KPI and metric reporting (MTTR, MTTD, incident volume by root cause, recurrence rate, CAPA closure rate) and deliver regular dashboards and executive summaries to leadership and key stakeholders.
Facilitate post-incident reviews (PIRs) and blameless retrospectives; prepare formal lessons-learned documents, update runbooks, and ensure follow-through on action items with tracked status and verification evidence.
Lead or support regulatory and compliance-related issue investigations (e.g., SOX, HIPAA, PCI, FDA) ensuring audit-ready documentation, remediation tracking and timely reporting to compliance and legal teams.
Create and maintain runbooks, playbooks and incident response procedures for common failure scenarios; perform tabletop exercises and crisis simulations to validate readiness and improve response times.
Act as the escalation point for high-severity incidents, coordinating disaster recovery activities, cross-team war rooms and executive incident calls while managing communications and stakeholder expectations.
Propose and implement automation and tooling improvements (alerting thresholds, on-call routing, incident creation, and playbook triggers) to reduce manual effort and accelerate detection-to-resolution cycles.
Manage vendor and third-party incident coordination, clarifying contractual SLAs, shepherding remediation, and ensuring root cause visibility when external systems contribute to incidents.
Support change advisory board (CAB) reviews by assessing incident-related change risks, verifying that fixes include adequate rollback plans and identifying potential regression points.
Deliver training, onboarding and enablement to engineers, support staff and business stakeholders on best practices for incident reporting, root-cause documentation, and effective escalation.
Execute quantitative analysis of incident datasets using SQL, Excel, Python or BI tools (Tableau, Power BI) to uncover root cause correlations, predict high-risk components, and inform prioritization of engineering work.
Establish and manage a prioritized backlog of problem remediation initiatives; collaborate with product and engineering leaders to secure sprint capacity and track business value delivered by fixes.
Drive quality assurance of CAPA implementation by validating remediation through test evidence, sampling, or post-deployment monitoring and formally closing issues only after verification of effectiveness.
Contribute to governance by drafting policies and standards for incident classification, severity tiers, SLA definitions and reporting cadence; ensure consistent application across global teams.
Champion cross-functional communication plans during incidents, preparing clear status updates, timelines, customer-facing messages and debriefs that maintain trust and transparency.
Lead continuous risk assessments for critical services and components; recommend mitigations (redundancy, throttling, feature toggles) and influence product roadmaps to reduce systemic risk.
Maintain a library of known errors and workaround documentation for rapid incident containment; ensure knowledge base articles are searchable, accurate and kept current.
Coordinate metrics-driven postmortem follow-up, tracking the effectiveness of remediation actions over time and escalating stalled or ineffective CAPAs to senior leadership.
Mentor junior incident and problem managers, defining career development goals, sharing best practices and contributing to process maturity growth across the organization.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Proven experience with incident and problem management tools: ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, BMC Remedy or equivalent.
Strong Root Cause Analysis (RCA) capability using formal methodologies (5 Whys, Fishbone, Fault Tree Analysis, Kepner-Tregoe).
Familiarity with ITIL problem/incident/change processes and service management best practices.
Experience designing and maintaining dashboards and reports in Power BI, Tableau, or Looker; advanced Excel skills (pivot tables, VBA a plus).
SQL proficiency for querying incident, logs, and telemetry datasets; ability to synthesize results into actionable insights.
Basic scripting or data analysis proficiency (Python, R, or equivalent) for automation and exploratory analysis.
Hands-on experience with monitoring, alerting and observability tools (Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, Prometheus) to interpret telemetry and triage issues.
Knowledge of CAPA lifecycle management, corrective action verification and audit-ready documentation processes.
Understanding of change management and release processes, including rollback strategies, feature flags and deployment gating.
Familiarity with compliance frameworks (SOX, HIPAA, PCI, FDA) and ability to support regulatory incident investigations.
Ability to create, configure and automate workflows within ticketing platforms (business rules, SLA timers, notifications).
Experience with on-call processes, incident communication templates and running war rooms.

Soft Skills

Exceptional stakeholder management and cross-functional communication skills; able to lead calm, structured responses under pressure.
Strong problem-solving mindset with the ability to prioritize high-impact issues and influence engineering roadmaps.
Clear, concise technical writing for postmortems, CAPAs, runbooks and executive summaries.
Facilitation skills to run blameless postmortems and multi-team retrospectives effectively.
High emotional intelligence and the ability to manage conflict constructively during escalations.
Strong organizational skills with a focus on follow-through, tracking open actions and ensuring effective closure.
Ability to translate complex technical root causes into business impact narratives for executives and non-technical stakeholders.
Self-starter mentality, comfortable in ambiguous situations and able to drive cross-team outcomes without direct authority.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Business Administration, Risk Management or related field.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree in Business Administration (MBA), Information Systems, or a related technical master's degree.
Professional certifications such as ITIL Foundation/Practitioner, Six Sigma, Lean, PMP, or Certified ScrumMaster (CSM).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science / Software Engineering
Information Technology / Systems
Business Administration / Operations Management
Risk Management / Compliance

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

3–8 years in incident/issue/problem management, site reliability engineering support, operations, or technical program management; consultant or client-facing experience preferred.

Preferred:

5+ years of direct experience leading incident and problem management programs in SaaS, FinTech, Healthcare, or large enterprise environments, with demonstrated success reducing incident recurrence and improving MTTR.