| Detail | For this role |
|---|---|
| Department | Information Technology |
| Level | Manager |
| Reports to | Head of Delivery |
| Direct reports | Application Support Engineer, Production Support Engineer, L1 Support Engineer |
| Experience | 10 to 14 years in application or production support, with 3 or more years managing a support team |
Application Support Manager job description template
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Job title: Application Support Manager
Department: Information Technology
Reports to: Head of Delivery
Location: [City], [office, branch or site]
About the role
An Application Support Manager runs the team that keeps business applications working after go-live, such as ERP, CRM, billing, core banking or custom software. They manage L2 and L3 support engineers, own the incident, problem and change processes for those applications, and answer to business users or clients for SLA performance. In Indian IT services firms, captive centres and BPOs the team often works shifts that cover several time zones. A good one keeps tickets within SLA, removes repeat incidents at the root and knows every critical batch job by name.
Key responsibilities
- Plan shift rosters and on-call rotas so every supported application has cover during business hours and batch windows.
- Watch the ticket queue daily and route priority 1 and priority 2 incidents to the right engineer or vendor without delay.
- Lead the bridge call for major incidents, keep business users updated and decide when a change must be rolled back.
- Run problem management for repeat incidents and get permanent fixes scheduled with the development team.
- Review changes, patches and releases for supported applications at the change advisory board.
- Track SLA performance, backlog age and ticket trends, and present a monthly service review to business owners or the client.
- Maintain the knowledge base, runbooks and batch job schedules so new engineers can resolve common issues on their own.
- Take over new applications from projects with documentation, access and an agreed hypercare period.
- Chase vendors and product companies on bugs in third-party software until fixes are delivered.
- Coach support engineers and cross-train them across applications to keep every shift covered.
Requirements
- B.E., B.Tech, B.Sc IT or MCA
- ITIL 4 Foundation certification
- Higher ITIL modules such as Managing Professional are an advantage
- 10 to 14 years in application or production support, with 3 or more years managing a support team
KRAs and KPIs for a Application Support Manager
Key result areas for the appraisal form, each with a KPI you can measure every month or quarter.
| Key result area | How to measure it |
|---|---|
| SLA compliance | At least 95 percent of incidents responded to and resolved within the contracted SLA each month |
| Major incidents | Root cause report for every priority 1 incident within 3 working days |
| Repeat incidents | Incidents from known problems falling quarter on quarter after permanent fixes |
| Backlog health | No open ticket older than 30 days without an agreed plan and date |
| Change success | At least 98 percent of changes to supported applications go live without causing an incident |
| User satisfaction | Average ticket satisfaction score of 4 or more out of 5 |
Skills and tools
Tools used day to day: ServiceNow or BMC Remedy, Jira Service Management, Splunk or ELK, Control-M or Autosys, SQL Developer or SSMS, Microsoft Teams bridge calls.
Reporting line and career path
Next roles: Delivery Manager, Head of Delivery, IT Head
Interview questions for a Application Support Manager
- A nightly billing batch failed and customers will get wrong invoices in the morning. Walk me through the next four hours.
- How do you tell an incident from a problem, and who owns each in your team?
- SLA compliance fell from 97 to 88 percent in one month. How do you find out why?
- How would you build a 24x7 roster with twelve engineers?
- A business head wants an urgent change deployed without testing. What do you do?
- How do you stop your engineers burning out on night shifts and on-call?
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What does an application support manager do?
An application support manager leads the team that keeps business applications running after go-live. They manage shift rosters and on-call, handle major incidents, run problem and change management, track SLAs and report service performance to business owners or clients. They also make sure runbooks and the knowledge base let the team fix common issues quickly.
What is the difference between application support and production support?
The terms overlap. Application support usually covers user issues, data fixes, configuration and small enhancements for business applications. Production support leans towards keeping live systems healthy: batch jobs, monitoring alerts, deployments and outages. Many Indian companies run both under one application support manager.
Which certification is good for an application support manager?
ITIL 4 Foundation is the standard requirement, since the job runs incident, problem and change management every day. Higher ITIL modules help in service management careers. Knowledge of the applications you support, such as SAP, Oracle or Salesforce, often matters more to employers than extra certificates.