IT Service Recovery Consultant

We are looking for an experienced IT Service Recovery & Runbook Consultant to support a consultancy engagement focused on improving the ability of a large organisation to restore and recover the IT components underpinning its critical services.

This is a technical discovery and consultancy assignment, rather than a traditional Business Continuity or Operational Resilience role.

The initial engagement will assess the organisation's existing recovery documentation, establish a standardised approach to technical runbooks, identify the IT components requiring runbooks and determine the work required for a subsequent implementation programme.

Working closely with platform engineering teams, technical SMEs and IT component owners, you will:

• Define a standard service restoration runbook template, including the minimum technical processes and information required to recover IT components successfully.
• Develop a runbook standard covering runbook creation, content, ownership, maintenance and ongoing management.
• Review existing CMDB, service, application and architecture information to identify the IT components requiring recovery runbooks.
• Determine the appropriate level of component decomposition and when infrastructure/components require standalone runbooks.
• Build out an initial runbook catalogue, mapping critical services to the applications, middleware, databases, servers and other supporting components on which they depend.
• Review existing recovery procedures, build documentation and technical artefacts to establish what can be reused.
• Conduct a gap analysis across identified components, assessing existing documentation against the new runbook standard.
• Assess remediation effort for individual runbooks using High/Medium/Low complexity and effort estimates.
• Work directly with technical SMEs to create runbooks for two representative IT components.
• Test and validate these runbooks, including technical recovery steps, commands, prerequisites, dependencies and validation checks.
• Use the discovery and validation findings to develop a high-level delivery plan for the subsequent implementation phase.
• Estimate the resources, technical SME effort, dependencies, timescales and costs required to create and test the remaining runbooks.
• Develop an initial prioritisation approach and programme RAID log.

We are particularly interested in people with a strong technical background across IT infrastructure, platforms and service recovery.

You should have experience of:

• IT service restoration, recovery or disaster recovery within large and complex technology environments.
• Creating or improving detailed technical runbooks, recovery procedures, operating procedures or operational documentation.
• Understanding how applications and services depend upon underlying servers, databases, middleware, networks and infrastructure/platform components.
• Working with infrastructure and platform engineering teams to understand how systems are built, operated and recovered.
• Translating knowledge held by technical SMEs into clear, repeatable and testable recovery procedures.
• Reviewing existing technical documentation and identifying gaps against an agreed standard.
• Understanding service/component dependencies and the sequencing required for successful end-to-end recovery.
• Working with CMDB and service/application information to understand technology estates and dependencies.
• Facilitating technical discovery workshops and engaging effectively with engineers, architects, service owners and senior stakeholders.
• Estimating the effort required for technical remediation or documentation programmes.

Knowledge of areas such as backup and restore, server recovery, databases, middleware, application recovery, infrastructure…