Role Summary
This role manages day-to-day production support for business-critical applications on the IBM i / AS400 platform.
The Technical Support Senior Supervisor is accountable for the performance and control of the IBM i application support assignment group. This includes ensuring incidents, requests, operational issues and support queues are actively managed against agreed service levels.
This is a support management role, not a development role. The candidate does not need to be an RPG developer, but must have enough application support and incident management experience to lead the team, challenge poor ticket quality, guide issue diagnosis and escalate effectively to senior technical teams.
The role is expected to move the team beyond reactive ticket handling by improving service control, SLA performance, aged backlog, stakeholder communication, team resilience and continuous improvement.
Role Overview
You will manage the IBM i / AS400 application support team responsible for the Policy Administration System and related operational services.
You will ensure the assignment group works with strong discipline across incident management, request handling, operational recovery, batch support, queue management, escalation, backlog control and stakeholder communication.
The role operates in an ITIL-aligned and Agile environment. It leads the L2 support analysts and works closely with L3 engineering, IT Application Owners, Service Performance, Problem Management, Change Management, Infrastructure, Enterprise Operations and business stakeholders.
You will partner with the IT Application Owner to provide a clear view of service health, operational risk, recurring issues, backlog and improvement priorities. The IT Application Owner owns the service outcomes; this role owns the operational execution and team performance needed to support them.
Key Responsibilities
1. Assignment Group Leadership & Operational Control
- Manage the IBM i application support assignment group and ensure the team operates with clear ownership, accountability and service discipline.
- Ensure all incidents and requests have a named owner and are actively progressed.
- Maintain control of the support queue, ensuring no ticket is left unowned, idle or invisible.
- Review open incidents, requests, aged tickets, stuck tickets and priority items on a regular basis.
- Ensure team members understand priorities, escalation paths and expected ticket handling standards.
- Lead daily or regular operational reviews to maintain visibility of workload, blockers and service risks.
- Escalate issues early where the team is blocked by dependency, capacity, ownership or technical constraints.
2. Incident & Request Management
- Ensure incidents and service requests are managed through ServiceNow in line with agreed processes and service levels.
- Monitor incident and request queues to ensure timely assignment, updates, progression and resolution.
- Drive timely resolution of incidents, particularly where there is business impact or SLA risk.
- Ensure priority incidents are handled with urgency, clear ownership and appropriate stakeholder communication.
- Review ticket quality, including categorisation, prioritisation, updates, resolution notes and closure information.
- Reduce hand-offs, unnecessary reassignment and poor ticket routing through improved triage and team discipline.
- Ensure all priority incidents have appropriate follow-up, RCA input and recovery actions documented where required.
3. Service Performance, SLA & Backlog Management
- Monitor SLA performance, MTTR, incident volumes, request volumes, aged backlog, stale tickets and reassignment trends.
- Use ServiceNow dashboards and reporting to actively manage service performance and queue health.
- Reduce aged backlog and ensure overdue or long-running tickets are actively reviewed and progressed.
- Ensure tickets are updated regularly and do not remain silent for extended periods.
- Identify emerging workload, capacity or quality issues and take corrective action.
- Work with the Service Performance Manager to understand trends, underperformance, risks and improvement opportunities.
- Provide regular status updates and service performance insights to support leadership and IT Application Owners.
4. IBM i Application Support Operations
- Oversee support for business-critical applications running on IBM i / AS400.
- Ensure the team supports daily operational processes, critical transaction windows and end-of-day / overnight batch activity where applicable.
- Ensure batch failures, processing delays, operational exceptions and system alerts are investigated and escalated appropriately.
- Coordinate with senior analysts, L3 engineering or infrastructure teams where deeper technical investigation is required.
- Ensure operational procedures, runbooks, recovery steps and escalation guidance are available and maintained.
- Maintain sufficient team awareness of IBM i application behaviour, operational dependencies and known support scenarios.
- Support planning for rotational shift, out-of-hours or on-call coverage where required.
5. Problem Management & Repeat Issue Reduction
- Identify recurring incidents, repeat failure patterns and known operational pain points.
- Ensure recurring issues are raised into the Problem Management process where appropriate.
- Partner with the Problem Manager, IT Application Owner and L3 engineering teams to ensure root causes are investigated and corrective actions are tracked.
- Ensure major incidents and recurring service issues have appropriate RCA input from the support team.
- Track workarounds, known errors and permanent fix actions through to resolution.
- Drive the team away from repeatedly fixing the same issue and towards eliminating underlying causes.
- Support quarterly or periodic trend analysis to identify the top recurring incident themes and improvement opportunities.
6. Stakeholder Communication & Service Reviews
- Provide clear, timely and professional communication to business users, application owners and support stakeholders.
- Ensure stakeholders are not surprised by silent tickets, uncommunicated delays or unresolved service risks.
- Maintain communication discipline during priority incidents, escalations and operational issues.
- Partner with the IT Application Owner to conduct regular service reviews for key IBM i applications.
- Provide a simple, honest service view covering incident volume, SLA performance, backlog, top issues, repeat incidents, risks, actions and owners.
- Ensure stakeholder concerns are captured, tracked and followed through.
- Reduce escalations caused by poor ownership, lack of updates or unclear communication.
7. Team Capability, Coaching & Resilience
- Lead, coach and develop IBM i application support analysts.
- Build team capability in incident handling, troubleshooting, customer communication, ServiceNow discipline and operational support.
- Ensure knowledge is shared across the team to reduce dependency on single individuals.
- Identify training needs across IBM i application knowledge, SQL, troubleshooting, batch operations, application processes and support tools.
- Support cross-training so critical applications and processes have adequate coverage.
- Promote a culture of ownership, learning, collaboration and continuous improvement.
- Ensure junior analysts receive appropriate guidance, mentoring and escalation support from more experienced team members.
8. Documentation, Knowledge & Operational Standards
- Ensure support documentation, runbooks, knowledge articles and operational procedures are created and maintained.
- Promote consistent use of Confluence, ServiceNow knowledge, runbooks and approved documentation repositories.
- Ensure incident resolutions and workarounds are documented clearly for reuse.
- Maintain escalation paths, support procedures, batch recovery steps and known issue guidance.
- Ensure documentation gaps are identified and addressed as part of service improvement.
- Support operational readiness for major releases, changes or transition of new services into support.
9. Collaboration with IT Application Owner, L3 and Service Management Roles
- Partner with the IT Application Owner to provide visibility of IBM i application service health, operational risk and support performance.
- Escalate technical issues to L3 engineering teams with clear evidence, impact, reproduction steps and support context.
- Work with Problem Management to address recurring incidents and permanent corrective actions.
- Work with Change Management to ensure production support impacts are understood for planned changes.
- Work with Service Transition / Readiness to ensure new or changed services are fit to support.
- Collaborate with Infrastructure, Enterprise Operations, Security, Compliance and vendor teams where required.
Qualifications / Knowledge
Service Management Skills
Essential
- Strong understanding of application support, production support or technology operations.
- Experience managing incidents, service requests, support queues and operational escalations.
- Good working knowledge of ITIL-aligned incident, request, problem and change processes.
- Experience using ServiceNow or similar IT service management tools.
- Ability to manage SLA performance, backlog, aged tickets, ticket quality and operational priorities.
- Understanding of how to use metrics and dashboards to drive action.
- Strong appreciation of production support controls, service reliability and operational risk.
Desirable
- ITIL Foundation certification or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience with ServiceNow dashboards, reporting or operational scorecards.
- Experience supporting production applications in a regulated or business-critical environment.
- Exposure to incident, problem, change, CMDB and knowledge management practices.
Technical / Domain Understanding
Essential
- Experience working in an application support, technology support or production operations environment.
- Ability to understand technical issues sufficiently to guide triage, challenge poor analysis and ensure appropriate escalation.
- Strong understanding of troubleshooting principles, issue diagnosis and operational recovery.
- Familiarity with databases, batch processing, application logs, interfaces and integrated system environments.
- Ability to work effectively with technical teams even where the role is not hands-on development.
Desirable
- Exposure to IBM i / AS400 environments.
- Understanding of IBM i operational concepts such as jobs, batch processing, queues, logs or system messages.
- Basic understanding of SQL or willingness to develop SQL investigation skills.
- Experience supporting policy administration, healthcare, insurance, financial services or other core transactional platforms.
- Exposure to Jira, Agile delivery processes or engineering backlog management.
Not Required
- RPG development experience is not required.
- Hands-on code development is not a primary responsibility of this role.
- The role should be able to lead support investigation and escalation, but permanent code fixes remain the responsibility of L3 engineering / development teams.
Leadership Experience
Essential
- Experience leading or coordinating an application support, service desk, operations or technical support team.
- Experience managing ticket queues, operational workloads and service priorities.
- Experience coaching team members and holding individuals accountable for delivery standards.
- Experience communicating with business users, technology teams and senior stakeholders.
- Demonstrated ability to drive action, ownership and follow-through in a support environment.
Desirable
- Experience managing distributed, regional or vendor-supported teams.
- Experience supporting out-of-hours, shift-based or on-call operational models.
- Experience improving support processes, documentation, ticket quality or service performance.
- Experience participating in service reviews, operational governance or production support improvement initiatives.
Soft Skills
- Strong leadership and team management capability.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
- Strong analytical and logical thinking.
- Calm and structured approach to incident handling and escalation.
- Ability to convert operational data into clear actions.
- Strong customer service mindset.
- High level of ownership and accountability.
- Comfortable challenging poor discipline or lack of progress constructively.
- Able to manage competing priorities in a fast-paced production environment.
- Practical, outcome-focused and continuous improvement oriented.
- Able to coach, develop and build confidence in support analysts.
Preferred Qualifications
- Degree or equivalent experience in Information Technology, Computer Science, Business Information Systems, Service Management or a related discipline.
- ITIL Foundation certification or equivalent practical experience.
- ServiceNow experience.
- Experience in application support or production support leadership.
- Experience in healthcare, insurance, financial services or regulated environments.
- Exposure to IBM i / AS400 application support environments preferred.
Career Progression
This role provides a pathway into broader application support leadership, service management, production support operations, service performance management or application service ownership.
Successful candidates will build deeper experience in IBM i application support, operational service management, stakeholder governance, service performance analytics, problem management and production support transformation.
About The Cigna Group
Cigna Healthcare, a division of The Cigna Group, is an advocate for better health through every stage of life. We guide our customers through the health care system, empowering them with the information and insight they need to make the best choices for improving their health and vitality. Join us in driving growth and improving lives.