IT Enterprise Release Management Lead

Florida Crystals Corporation is a fully integrated cane sugar company. Florida Crystals regeneratively farms sugarcane and rice in South Florida, where it owns two sugar mills, a sugar refinery, a packaging and distribution center, Florida's only rice mill, a compost facility, and one of the largest renewable power plants of its kind in the U.S., which uses sugarcane fiber to generate eco-friendly energy that powers its sugar operations.

Florida Crystals owns one of the largest Regenerative Organic Certified farms in the U.S. and its Florida Crystals products are the only ROC sugar grown and milled sugar in the country. Florida Crystals owns ASR Group International, Inc., a holding company that conducts operations through its subsidiaries. The ASR Group family of companies make up the world s largest refiner and marketer of cane sugar.

Florida Crystals is headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida. Learn more at

The IT Enterprise Release Management Lead position requires a strategic leader who is responsible for the IT release management lifecycle, and whose mission is to protect the integrity of the production environments while enabling business-as-usual corrections, applying application patches, supporting stacks/upgrades and various enhancements. It ensures projects are deployed in a controlled manner with minimal risk to the business.

Release management lifecycle includes planning, scheduling, coordinating and the management of releases for multiple applications across multiple lines of business in pursuit of aligning with the business strategy and growth opportunities. This position will also be responsible for developing strategies for release governance; establishing consistent release management processes, monitoring compliance with established SLAs, ensuring QA, developing performance metrics and managing interdependencies and milestone adherence to ensure the integrity of each release.

• Develop, implement and drive adoption of the release strategy
• Build and track the IT release calendar
• Forward plan release windows and cycles across a portfolio
• Manage risks and resolve issues that affect release scope, schedule and quality
• Measure and monitor progress of release activities
• Participate in release readiness reviews, milestone reviews and business go/no-go reviews
• Communicate release details and schedules to all relevant parties
• Inform senior management of exposure to release risk and effectively mitigate it
• Produce deployment, runbooks and implementation plans in release
• Conduct release readiness reviews, milestone reviews and business go/no-go reviews
• Monitor and measure progress to ensure projects are adhering to release standards
• Report on progress of releases
• Lead and coordinate the production cutover activities of major releases, including the execution of deployment plans
• Lead strategic direction for release management processes and tools
• Establish consistent release management processes and continually work to improve them
• Identify and drive adoption of best-in-class tools to enable efficient release management
• Lead strategic direction for automated testing for applications
• Establish consistent release management processes and continually work to improve them
• Identify and drive adoption of best-in-class tools to automate testing
• Work with AMS Lead and AMS Manager in relation to change management processes, governance and measuring of compliance

• 15 years of experience in IT organization
• 10 years of experience working with project management
• 10 years of experience with release and change management
• Experience and proven track record with developing, implementing and governing processes
• Proven interpersonal collaborative skills: two-way communication skills (oral and written), ability to build relationships, influence others, work with a diverse internal and external stakeholder base and the ability to communicate release management concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Proven ability to deliver results with minimal supervision
• Poise and ability to act calmly and competently in high-pressure, high-stress situations
• Prior experience…