Torchora
Back to Home

operational support

title: Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Operational Support
salary: $ - $
categories: [Operations, Support, IT, Customer Service]
description: A comprehensive overview of the key responsibilities, required technical skills and professional background for the role of a Operational Support.
Comprehensive list of responsibilities and skills for Operational Support professionals. Includes detailed primary and secondary duties, required technical and soft skills, education and experience expectations, and career progression paths optimized for recruiters, job seekers, and applicant-tracking systems. Keywords: Operational Support, incident management, SLA, Service Desk, root cause analysis, process improvement, ticketing systems.

🎯 Role Definition

Operational Support professionals ensure uninterrupted business operations by managing incidents, performing routine system maintenance, resolving user-facing issues, enforcing service-level agreements (SLAs), and driving continuous process improvements. This role acts as the frontline liaison between technical teams, business stakeholders, and end users to maintain system availability, improve operational efficiency, and reduce operational risk.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Help Desk Technician
  • Junior Systems Administrator
  • Customer Support Analyst

Advancement To:

  • Senior Operational Support Engineer
  • Operations Team Lead / Supervisor
  • IT Service Delivery Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • Incident Manager
  • Problem Management Analyst
  • IT Service Management (ITSM) Consultant

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Monitor production systems, dashboards, and alerts continuously to identify and respond to incidents within SLA thresholds, ensuring timely escalation and communication to stakeholders to minimize business impact.
  • Triage incoming support tickets and service requests using ticketing systems (e.g., ServiceNow, JIRA, Zendesk), prioritize by business impact and urgency, and manage end-to-end ticket lifecycle to resolution.
  • Perform first- and second-line troubleshooting for applications, networks, and infrastructure, applying diagnostic tools and runbooks to restore services quickly and prevent recurrence.
  • Execute operational playbooks and runbooks for scheduled maintenance, patching, and deployments, coordinating with release managers to minimize downtime and adhere to change control processes.
  • Coordinate incident response across cross-functional teams (development, QA, security, network) during major incidents, act as an incident coordinator when required, and ensure timely incident communications and containment.
  • Conduct root cause analysis (RCA) for recurring incidents, document findings, and drive corrective actions and process improvements to reduce repeat incidents and mean time to repair (MTTR).
  • Maintain and update operational documentation, knowledge base articles, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and onboarding materials for new team members and stakeholders.
  • Provide after-hours on-call support on a rotating schedule, perform emergency remediation tasks, and participate in post-incident reviews to improve operational readiness.
  • Manage vendor relationships and third-party escalations for hosted services, cloud providers, telecoms, and software vendors, ensuring SLAs are met and support handoffs are effective.
  • Analyze monitoring data and trending reports to proactively identify capacity constraints, recurring alerts, and performance bottlenecks, recommending improvements to reduce noise and false positives.
  • Implement and maintain automation scripts and runbooks (e.g., Powershell, Bash, Python) to streamline repetitive operational tasks and accelerate incident resolution.
  • Validate system backups, disaster recovery (DR) procedures, and failover tests, coordinating with infrastructure teams to verify recoverability and business continuity readiness.
  • Enforce change management processes by reviewing change requests for operational impact, validating rollback plans, and ensuring proper testing and approvals before implementation.
  • Support deployment and release activities, including pre- and post-deployment checks, smoke tests, and quick rollback procedures to ensure minimal service disruption.
  • Provide timely and professional communication to business stakeholders, customers, and management during incidents, using templated and situational updates to maintain transparency.
  • Maintain compliance with internal controls, security policies, and regulatory requirements by applying defined operational safeguards and participating in audits and remediation efforts.
  • Perform scheduled system health checks and housekeeping tasks (log rotation, disk cleanup, archiving) to maintain system stability and optimize resource utilization.
  • Facilitate cross-functional knowledge transfer sessions, trainings, and tabletop exercises to elevate organizational operational maturity and incident response capability.
  • Collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate business requirements into operational requirements, ensuring systems are supportable and monitored correctly.
  • Contribute to capacity planning by providing operational inputs on expected growth, resource utilization trends, and recommended provisioning strategies.
  • Track and report operational metrics and KPIs (MTTR, MTTA, incident volume, SLA compliance) to leadership and use data-driven insights to prioritize improvements.
  • Drive continuous improvement initiatives by proposing and implementing process changes that reduce manual effort, lower operational risk, and improve service reliability.
  • Participate in cross-team projects to integrate monitoring, logging, and alerting into new services and applications before they go into production.
  • Ensure customer satisfaction by following up on resolved issues, soliciting feedback, and making recommendations to enhance the end-user experience.

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.
  • Assist with onboarding and training new hires on operational tools, policies, and escalation paths.
  • Help define alert thresholds and reduce alert fatigue by tuning monitoring and observation systems.
  • Participate in procurement and evaluation of operational tooling, offering practical feedback on maintainability and supportability.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Incident management and escalation (major incident coordination, incident war rooms).
  • Strong knowledge of ticketing systems and ITSM tools (ServiceNow, JIRA Service Desk, BMC Remedy, Zendesk).
  • Monitoring and observability tools experience (Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana).
  • Basic scripting and automation (Bash, PowerShell, Python) to create runbooks and automate repetitive tasks.
  • Familiarity with cloud platforms and operational practices (AWS, Azure, GCP) including instance management, networking, and IAM basics.
  • Understanding of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, load balancers, VPNs) and ability to troubleshoot network-related issues.
  • Experience with databases and query tools (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, basic SQL troubleshooting).
  • Knowledge of CI/CD and release management tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, CircleCI) to support deployments and rollbacks.
  • Backup, DR, and high-availability best practices and validation experience.
  • Security and compliance awareness (access controls, incident reporting, basic SOC collaboration).
  • Log analysis and root cause investigation skills using centralized logging platforms.
  • Familiarity with configuration management and infrastructure-as-code (Ansible, Terraform, Chef) is a plus.
  • Ability to produce and maintain operational documentation, runbooks, and knowledge base content.

Soft Skills

  • Strong verbal and written communication skills for clear stakeholder updates during incidents and routine operations.
  • Customer-centric mindset with the ability to remain calm under pressure and prioritize user impact.
  • Analytical thinking and problem-solving skills for rapid diagnosis and remediation of complex issues.
  • Time management and prioritization to juggle multiple incidents, change windows, and ongoing operational tasks.
  • Team collaboration and cross-functional influence to coordinate effective responses and drive process changes.
  • Attention to detail for following procedures, documenting changes, and verifying remediation steps.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning attitude to keep pace with evolving technologies and operational practices.
  • Ownership and accountability for end-to-end incident resolution and follow-through on action items.
  • Coaching and mentoring ability to help junior team members build operational competence.
  • Service-oriented mindset with focus on SLA achievement and continuous operational improvement.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • High school diploma or equivalent; relevant technical certifications or demonstrable experience in operations/support roles.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Information Systems, Business Administration, or related field.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology
  • Systems Engineering
  • Business Administration with IT focus
  • Cybersecurity / Network Administration

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 2 to 5 years of hands-on operational support, system administration, or IT service desk experience.

Preferred:

  • 3+ years supporting production systems in medium-to-large enterprise environments, including cloud operations, incident management, and automation experience. Certifications such as ITIL Foundation, CompTIA Network+/Security+, AWS/Azure certifications, or ServiceNow admin are a plus.
Explore More Careers