Vendor Applications Manager

Our mission remains unchanged: to service the needs and aspirations of our customers and help create new stories, to take pleasure in making marked moments of delight. Whoever our customers are and wherever they come from, they can expect to be treated with grace, courtesy and care.

At Harrods we truly believe nothing is impossible. We drive ourselves and inspire others to always push for more. This passion to exceed is what sets us apart. We are proud to be a place where standing out means being yourself.

Our IT function are seeking an Application Vendor Manager that will be responsible for ensuring the application portfolio delivers fit for purpose applications that benefit the business and its processes. In this exciting role you’ll partner with the business and our third-party suppliers to improve the business offering, with a futureproof strategy and considered approach.

About you

You’ll be a highly motivated self-starter, with the capability to communicate and present to all levels. A skilled application specialist, experienced in managing complex application portfolios, you’ll have previous experience guiding business decisions to deliver application rationalisation into our method of selecting, implementing and maintaining business technology. This role requires a background of dealing with modern application methodologies, a technical understanding in application management and associated tooling and technologies, coupled with experience in vendor management core processes such as contract, relationship and vendor ownership, service oversight and representation as well as continuous service improvement. To succeed in this role, you’ll need a collaborative approach to influence and gain buy-in from key stakeholders and building new relationships across the IT function and externally with our 3rd party suppliers and managed services. You’ll have courage to challenge the status quo and the direction to lead others in times of service disruption and be able to build teams and processes capable of supporting and maintaining operational applications. This is an enabling role that ensures the application solutions that underpin business needs are available, stable, and meet the business requirements.

What to expect

In this role, you will leverage best practices for Application and Vendor Management and own the delivery of the applications portfolio that underpins Harrods business capability. You’ll face off as a subject matter expert to stakeholders at all levels business wide and externally with our partnered suppliers and service providers. You’ll negotiate, manage and deliver the procurement of new applications into the business and process manage the rationalisation of our current portfolio to deliver a tailored application roadmap. You’ll be responsible for the financial management and contract ownership from end-to-end, accountable to delivering an aligned strategy across all IT functions and the wider business. To manage this effectively you’ll need to play a dynamic role throughout all major application milestones such as major incident management, service oversight, application risk and change management through to daily request and performance management. This exciting and newly recreated position has an exciting ambition to make a sustainable impact on the IT operating model at Harrods. Whilst this role is primarily based in Hammersmith, there will be an ad hoc requirement to visit other Harrods locations with occasional out of hours commitments.

What is Important?

Organisation is so important to our team; we are expected to be consistent and accurate. Over time, we’ve built a reputation we are proud of. Our team is approachable and efficient – we need someone who shares our values and understands the importance of our place in the business. Sometimes we are very busy; our team shares the load, supports each other and wins as a team. We set deadlines, we hit those deadlines.

Our Promise to You

At Harrods we believe nothing is impossible. We drive ourselves and inspire others to always push for more. This passion to exceed is what sets us apart. We are proud to be a place where standing out means being yourself.