Assistant Manager - IT Change and Release control

Role Overview

Assistant Manager - IT Change and Release Control at Qiddiya Investment Company. The role is based at the company's location and reports to senior IT management overseeing change governance and service delivery optimization.

Role Purpose

To lead IT Change and Release Management processes, ensuring controlled, auditable deployment of changes and releases across all environments while managing IT demand and aligning service delivery with business strategy and risk governance.

Key Responsibilities

Change and Release Control

• Review, assess, and validate change and release requests to identify potential risks, conflicts, dependencies, and overall business impact.
• Facilitate and govern Change Advisory Board (CAB) and Emergency Change Advisory Board (ECAB) meetings, ensuring informed decision-making for both changes and releases, with clear accountability and approval outcomes.
• Own and maintain the Change & Release Calendar, ensuring alignment between planned changes, release windows, blackout periods, and business-critical events to minimize service disruption.
• Plan, coordinate, and govern software and infrastructure releases across environments (DEV, SIT, UAT, PROD), ensuring readiness, approvals, and adherence to agreed release windows.
• Ensure all changes and releases meet Change and release readiness criteria, including testing evidence, rollback plans, risk assessments, security approvals, and business sign-off prior to production deployment.
• Maintain accurate and auditable change and release documentation, including requests, approvals, release notes, implementation steps, rollback procedures, and post-release outcomes.
• Monitor and analyze Change & Release Management KPIs (e.g., change success rate, emergency changes, release failure rate, rollback frequency), identifying trends, risks, and opportunities for continuous improvement.
• Conduct and govern Post-Implementation Reviews (PIRs) for changes and releases, ensuring lessons learned are captured, corrective actions are tracked, and systemic issues are addressed.
• Support internal and external audits related to IT Change and Release Management by providing evidence, process compliance, and improvement actions.
• Enforce adherence to Change & Release Management policies, standards, and governance frameworks, ensuring alignment with ITIL best practices and organizational controls.

Stakeholder Management and Communication

• Work closely with IT operations, development teams, business units, cybersecurity, QA, and third-party vendors to coordinate change and release activities end-to-end.
• Provide clear, timely communication on change and release status, risks, dependencies, and impact assessments to all relevant stakeholders, including management and business owners.

IT Demand Management

• Oversee and coordinate the demand management process.
• Work with business relationship managers, service portfolio managers, service level managers, and other stakeholders to understand current and future demand for IT services.
• Plan and implement appropriate strategies to manage and influence demand.
• Identify and resolve issues or risks that may affect service delivery.
• Align IT strategy with business strategy and goals for long-term planning.
• Delegate authority to teams.
• Communicate and update the process, owning and configuring tools or templates to support the process.
• Ensure the demand management process runs smoothly.
• Facilitate demand management meetings and events.
• Work with requestors to prepare the deliverables needed.
• Capture the dispositions of demand items and ensure they move into their next phase based on those outcomes.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field.
• Minimum 5+ years of experience in IT Change Management, IT Change & Release Management, or IT Service Management roles.
• ITIL Foundation certification required.

Skills & Competencies

• Excellent communication, negotiation, and presentation skills.
• Highly organized with excellent time management skills.
• Strong understanding of IT infrastructure, enterprise applications, and cloud environments.
• Practical knowledge of Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD pipelines, and how governance integrates with them.
• Ability to assess technical risks without being execution-level technical.