Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Operations Support

🎯 Role Definition

Operations Support professionals deliver reliable day-to-day operational continuity by managing incidents, coordinating cross-functional teams, maintaining system health, and driving continuous process improvements. This role combines customer-facing support, technical troubleshooting, data analysis, and operational governance to ensure service delivery meets defined SLAs and business KPIs.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Customer Support Specialist or Customer Service Representative with proven escalation handling experience.
IT Help Desk Technician or Technical Support Engineer with experience in ticketing systems (ServiceNow, Jira).
Logistics Coordinator or Administrative Operations Associate with process and vendor coordination exposure.

Advancement To:

Operations Manager overseeing daily operations, SLA performance, and team coordination.
Senior Operations Analyst focusing on analytics, automation opportunities, and strategic projects.
Program Manager leading cross-functional process improvement initiatives and enterprise-level rollouts.

Lateral Moves:

Project Coordinator or Project Manager focusing on operational implementations.
Customer Success Manager responsible for post-sale support and retention strategies.
Business Analyst concentrating on operational KPIs, reporting, and systems optimization.

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Manage the end-to-end incident lifecycle using ticketing systems (ServiceNow, Jira, Zendesk), triaging incoming incidents, assigning to appropriate teams, updating status, and ensuring timely resolution in line with SLA targets.
Monitor daily operational dashboards and service health alerts (Datadog, Splunk, New Relic) to proactively identify outages, performance degradations, and capacity constraints, and coordinate immediate remediation steps with engineering and infrastructure teams.
Own escalations from internal stakeholders and customers; facilitate cross-functional war rooms and post-incident reviews to drive containment, remediation, and communications until full service restoration.
Maintain and optimize incident and problem management processes aligned with ITIL best practices, documenting incident trends, root cause analyses (RCA), and long-term corrective actions to reduce recurrence.
Coordinate vendor and third-party support, including managing escalation matrices, tracking vendor SLAs, and verifying vendor remediation actions to ensure external dependencies meet contractual obligations.
Execute daily operational checks, runbooks, and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for critical systems, including scheduled health checks, backups, failover tests, and change verification tasks.
Create, maintain, and distribute operational reports and KPIs (MTTR, MTBF, SLA compliance, ticket volume trends) to leadership and stakeholders using SQL, Excel, and BI tools such as Power BI or Tableau.
Perform data-driven troubleshooting and root cause analysis by querying production data, logs, and metrics, and collaborate with engineering to implement permanent fixes and automation where possible.
Lead regular change coordination and deployment readiness reviews; ensure communications, rollback plans, and stakeholder approvals are in place prior to production releases.
Manage user access requests, role assignments, and basic system administration tasks across CRM, ERP, and internal platforms while ensuring compliance with company security and change control policies.
Support onboarding and training of new operational staff by developing training materials, maintaining knowledge base articles, and delivering hands-on sessions for runbook procedures and ticket handling.
Drive continuous improvement initiatives to streamline workflows, reduce manual work through scripting or automation (Python, Bash, RPA), and improve mean time to resolution and customer satisfaction.
Conduct impact analysis and dependency mapping for cross-functional processes, ensuring operational continuity during planned maintenance and identifying single points of failure.
Serve as the primary point of contact for scheduled maintenance windows and unplanned outages; write and distribute timely customer-facing and internal incident communications.
Facilitate root cause and post-incident reviews with documented action items, owners, timelines, and verification criteria to ensure closure and sustained operational improvements.
Manage capacity and resource planning by analyzing historical usage patterns, forecasting demand, and coordinating with procurement and engineering to provision necessary infrastructure.
Enforce and audit adherence to operational policies, procedures, and compliance requirements (SOC2, ISO, GDPR) and support internal and external audit requests with timely evidence and clarifications.
Implement and maintain escalation matrices, runbooks, and decision trees to reduce decision latency and ensure consistent handling of high-severity incidents and critical customer escalations.
Collaborate closely with Product, Engineering, QA, and Customer Success to translate customer-impacting issues into prioritized backlog items and verify fixes in staging and production.
Drive cross-training and knowledge-sharing programs to build team resilience and reduce single-point dependencies; maintain comprehensive knowledge base articles and troubleshooting guides.
Participate in capacity and cost optimization initiatives, identifying redundant processes and proposing automation or vendor consolidation to improve operational efficiency and reduce spend.
Maintain a strong focus on customer experience by ensuring timely, transparent updates during incidents, proactively communicating planned maintenance, and incorporating customer feedback into process refinements.

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)

Incident management and escalation using ServiceNow, Jira, Zendesk or equivalent ticketing systems.
Monitoring and observability tools such as Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, or Prometheus for proactive incident detection.
SQL for data extraction, troubleshooting, and ad-hoc reporting (Postgres, MySQL, Redshift).
Advanced Excel skills including pivot tables, VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP, and data visualization for operational reporting.
Business intelligence tools: Power BI, Tableau, or Looker for KPI dashboards and stakeholder reports.
Basic scripting and automation using Python, Bash, or RPA tools to reduce manual operational tasks.
Knowledge of ITIL processes (incident, problem, change management) and SLA governance.
Familiarity with CRM and ERP platforms (Salesforce, Netsuite) for user management and process coordination.
Understanding of cloud infrastructure and services (AWS, Azure, GCP) and basic system administration concepts.
Root cause analysis (RCA) methodologies and post-incident review facilitation.
Version control and collaboration tools: Git, Confluence, and Jira for documentation and workflow management.
Security and compliance awareness, including SOC2, ISO 27001, and data privacy regulations like GDPR.

Soft Skills

Strong verbal and written communication skills with the ability to craft clear incident communications and executive summaries.
Excellent stakeholder management and customer-focused mindset for cross-functional collaboration and service delivery.
Prioritization and time management skills to manage concurrent incidents and tasks under pressure.
Problem-solving and analytical mindset with a focus on data-driven decision making.
Adaptability and resilience in fast-paced, high-urgency environments.
Team player with the ability to coach and mentor junior staff and build team knowledge.
Attention to detail and process orientation to maintain accurate documentation and runbooks.
Conflict resolution and negotiation skills when coordinating across vendors and internal teams.
Continuous improvement mindset with a proactive approach to identifying operational inefficiencies.
Project coordination skills for managing small to medium operational projects and deployments.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Associate degree or equivalent experience in Business, Information Technology, or Operations.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Information Technology, Computer Science, Supply Chain Management, or a related field.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Business Administration
Information Technology / Computer Science
Supply Chain / Logistics
Operations Management
Data Analytics / Business Intelligence

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

2–5 years of hands-on experience in operations support, technical support, IT operations, or customer-facing incident management roles.

Preferred:

3+ years of experience managing production incidents, working with ticketing systems (ServiceNow/Jira), and producing operational dashboards and RCA documentation.
Prior exposure to cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP), monitoring tools, and basic scripting for automation is strongly preferred.