by Rick Stomphorst
Imagine a enabling a food processor to grow 2x over the next 5-years through new technologies?
Searching for a hands-on IT Manager for a large food processing company in Brampton/Mississauga area. Initial 3-month contract with the possibility of roll becoming permanent.
Requires someone who will position IT as a Business partner through its journey of demonstrable continual improvement.
Initial engagement will include a discovery process to review company’s as-is environment and identity areas of improvements in reliability, speed, security, costs, increased functionality and / or new technologies to accelerate the business, providing them with a competitive advantage.
About the Job
The purpose of this role and why this role exists.
We are looking for a proactive individual, one who is continually looking for ways to improve the business by new or improved technology. The company growing yearly by double-digits. They need to ensure the computing production environment will scale, and contains sufficient redundancy, to meet their expected growth.
Top Responsibilities
The part that you play in this organization, and specific duties you are measured against.
- Supporting the production environment – supporting their hosted ERP is mission critical
- Managing vendors who provide virtually all of their computer services and maintenance
- Plant communication infrastructure (e.g. scanners, scales, label printers)
- Data and network security and backups
- Planning and implementation of upgrades to IT infrastructure
- Manage helpdesk
Some of the Experiences & Background we’d like to see
All the things you’re good at because you’ve done most of these before.
- Support of a production environment including networking, security, network latency, telephony, WAN, EDI, plant connectivity, hosted applications, monitoring system performance
- Supporting a production ERP or MRP
- Superior problem resolution techniques, practices and rapid root-cause determination. Avoiding system outages is a primary responsibility
- Managing a small team providing break/fix/diagnosis
- Experience managing vendors including SaaS providers
- Experience using SQL and SSRS
- Project Management and Budget Management
- Knowledge of current with leading edge processes and technology
- Knowledgeable with Microsoft’s hosted services
- Strong knowledge of the SaaS model
- Experience with Canadian food compliancy and regulations (nice to have)
- Degree in relevant discipline
Expect travel between GTA locations.
About the Company
They are a decades old food processing company providing packaged and unpackaged perishables to your grocery store.
Connect with Us!
To learn more about the client, their culture and the opportunity, we invite you to share your resume with us via this job board or to Rick@searchvelcity.ca, Subject: IT Manager
Have a canned cover letter? Delete it. Tell us why you’re perfect for this opportunity and you’re virtually guaranteed an interview.
by Rick Stomphorst
About the Job
The purpose of this role and why this role exists
We are growing our consulting team again. You will own the discovery process, requirements gathering and resulting back-end solutions design and integration between numerous legacy enterprise registration systems.
Require a senior solutions architect with exceptional communications skills to extract requirements from the various stakeholders and persuade business stakeholders of new solution design.
Location is downtown Toronto (50% for first 3-months) & Oakville with expected travel to stakeholder sites within Canada’s major cities.
Initial 3-month contract (min).
Perks
- Recent recipient of Employee Recommended Workplace Awards.
- On the Branham300 List of Top Canadian ICT Companies, 3x in a row
- Headquarters in NE Oakville. Less than 1km from Hwy 403, walking distance to cafes and eateries.
- Monthly Socials
Top Responsibilities
The part that you play in this organization, and specific duties you are measured against
- Elicit and document tangible business objectives that can be mapped to technology solutions
- Meet with technical stakeholders to obtain a detailed understanding of existing capabilities
- Back-end solutions design and integration between legacy enterprise systems
- Present technical strategies and standards to new clients
- Lead design meetings to draw out and clearly define development and implementation options
Own and develop relationships with clients, ensuring their business objectives are met
Some of the Experiences & Background we’d like to see
All the things you’re good at because you’ve done most of these before
- 7-10 years experience with Enterprise Solution Architecture
- Experience as an Integration Analyst, Technical Business Analyst or Systems Analyst role
- Demonstrated experience analyzing business and technical requirements and solution design
- Extensive working knowledge of current technologies and computing architectures including Microservice architecture, containerization (K8s, Docker), SOAP / RESTful service design and implementation
- Extensive working knowledge of Java, JavaScript, XML, TCP/IP, SQL Server, DB Design
- Familiarity with cloud-based computing platforms (e.g. AWS, Azure, Bluemix)
- Technical degree in Computer Science or Engineering at University or College level
Sound like you? Sent your resume to rick@searchvelocity.ca now!
Please include your resume.
About the Company
Our client is a software product company, custom software development and IT professional services firm.
In 2017, they were recognized as one of Canada’s Fastest-Growing Companies by Profit 500, a Top ICT Company by Branham and received the Excellence Award in Quality Improvement from PBMI. They are Canadian company based in Oakville.
Send your resume to Rick@SearchVelocity.ca
by Rick Stomphorst
Can you explain in detail the difference between an inner join and outer join? Can you recite a join syntax from memory? Do you know what are SQL Constraints? If the answers are obvious to you and you want to immerse yourself in complex SQL Quality Assurance challenges, then this role may be for you.
A SQL software company’s business continues to grow and we’re searching for a Senior ETL / API QA person to join their growing team.
The ideal candidate will be an organized, structure, collaborative individual with excellent technical writing skills, have strong theoretical SQL skills and possesses a programming background and has chosen to take Quality Assurance as their desired career path.
| Who will be successful in this role |
Who will not be successful in this role |
- Non-functional testing
- API testing
- Integration testing
- ETL testing experience
- Back-end testing
- I’m very strong in SQL
|
- Testing web apps, mobile apps, games
- Functional testing
- Expand your automation experience
|
Great career potential with a growing young company. You will obtain diverse experiences and an opportunity to grow professionally via these experiences. They offer a relaxed work environment, walking distance to eateries, and healthcare spending account.
About the Job
The purpose of this role and why this role exists
- Ensure their software product is of the highest possible quality
Top Responsibilities
The part that you play in this organization, and specific duties you are measured against
- Review requirements and technical design documents, where they exist, to provide timely QA estimates,
- Develop test cases and plans, prioritize, coordinate and perform manual testing activities for multiple simultaneous projects
- Ensure all user stories have adequate detail in the acceptance criteria as input to test case development
- Ensure that quality issues and defects are appropriately identified, documented, tracked, and resolved
- Assist in reproducing issues reported by clients (as needed)
Some of the Experiences & Background we’d like to see
All the things you’re good at because you’ve done most of these before
- 5 years experience performing QA within software companies (vs. banks or insurance companies) and strong knowledge of software QA methodologies, tools, and processes
- Excellent Microsoft SQL knowledge, SQL theory and principles, creating queries, joins, indexes, data migration & integration
- Integration QA experience, testing APIs and/or ETL is a must-have
- Experience with creating test cases & plan, manual and automated regression testing, and load testing
- Excellent troubleshooting and problem-solving skills
- Coding experience: Ability to write code or scripts in C# or SQL
- Knowledge of XML and JSON
- Quick learner, inquisitive and independent
- You have the ability to work in a cross-functional team organization
- You have strong professional communication skills
- Understand software architecture
- Bachelor Degree in Computer Science
Additionally Preferred Qualifications
- Microsoft Team Foundation Server
- Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
- Experience working in an Agile/Scrum development process
- Experience with CRMs
Sound like you? Sent your resume to rick@searchvelocity.ca now!
Please include your resume.
About the Company
Our client is a growing 6-year old company which has already attracted 3,000+ Enterprise-level clients from over 70+ countries including Fortune 500 companies. These clients now rely on our client’s solutions to integrate data between their various applications. They have become a leading provider of data integration.
Application integration is a painful and daunting task, typically costly and inefficient to develop. To address this, our client has developed robust value-add additions which leverage existing Microsoft integration offerings. Their software solution is cost-effective and easy for developers to use.
They offer a relaxed work environment, walking distance to eateries, and healthcare spending account.
by Rick Stomphorst
During the interview process, virtually every candidate asks about the culture of the prospective new company, which is rarely known, and is thereby given little weight when deciding the merits of a new job. People wrongly believe they can adapt to virtually any culture, or can impact the culture to suit them (there is some truth to the later, if you’re joining a small company).
What is culture then? How do you determine culture? One method is by learning the symbols, norms and assumptions.
Symbols are the logos, dress code and décor.
Norms are shared social, often un-written, rules. What behaviour is tolerated, discouraged or encouraged? How do people interact with or treat each other or other departments? Are there shared values (e.g. trust) or routines (e.g. meeting minutes)?
Assumptions are undocumented rules or truths within an organization. “We always do X this way”.
Will your symbols, norms and assumptions align with your new company’s or create friction? You either have to adapt or alter your cultural norms or identify which are helping or hindering your performance.
In your on-boarding plan, ask your new colleagues why and why not they enjoy working there. The answer is often the answer to the culture question.
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by Rick Stomphorst
How well you perform at your new role will largely be affected by how well you interface with new manager(s), colleagues, staff, stakeholders, decision makers, influencers, clients and certainly others. If you don’t create good alliances with this group of people, projects you work on will be at risk, and resultingly so will your on-boarding.
For each project or exercise ask yourself which decision makers are essential to move forward.
Decision makers are in turn influenced by the opinion of their trusted network for advice and counsel. This network, and we all have them, is essentially a shadow organization. Each of the individuals in trusted network brings influence due to either their expertise, control of information, connections to others, assess to resources (money and people), and/or loyalty. Any of these people can positively impact your efforts or derail them. You need to identify who these individuals are.
Ask your new manager for list of key people outside your group whom she thinks you should connect with (by now you should have met with key people within your group). Using the strategy in an previous blog, strive to ask these people the same set of questions.
Detractors from your efforts or projects usually caused by to one or more of these reasons:
- Desire to maintain the status quo.
- Fear of looking incompetent. E.g. adopting new technology they don’t understand.
- Threatens their power. E.g. Removing their control, recognition, or usefulness to the business.
- Negative consequence to their allies. E.g. Your changes may negatively impact people or business units they care about or feel responsible for.
The above may not be adversaries if you can just manage or mitigate any impact. Think hard about how to make it hard for them to say no. Avoid asking them to make a decision that will involve any of the above impacts.
Find alignment with key players where you projects/work can mesh or leverage each other.
Build alliances that will help you advance your work. You need Technical advisors, Cultural advisors and Political advisors, and a mix of internal and external advisors. You may have been hired to make changes that may regrettably, but unavoidably, impact others, however, for the good of the overall business. If so, you will need your own network soon.
Remember that in today’s business climate, no senior-level manager (perhaps you) is hired to maintain the status-quo. They (you?) are hired to make impactful changes to the business.
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