Core takeaway: service support leadership is not "people skills" in one meeting and "budget" in another. The same week usually forces both, plus vendor performance, on services that finance and financial-crimes teams depend on.
At BMO Financial Group I was Senior Manager, Technology Support from October 2023 to January 2025. Earlier BMO roles ran from January 2015. This note focuses on the Senior Manager mandate, where people, budget, and vendors were concurrent.
The operating surface
I led 9 FTE Linux and Windows systems administrators and 10 TCS and HCL contract resources.
The team supported corporate, finance, and financial-crimes technology across AWS, Azure, and on-premises environments.
That mix shaped the job:
- employee capacity vs contracted after-hours coverage
- cloud and on-premises support in one operating picture
- service pressure that does not care which badge someone wears
Business stake: after-hours coverage failures on finance and financial-crimes technology are continuity and control risk, not just staffing inconvenience. The budget and the vendor contracts existed to keep that surface operable.
Budget was a weekly constraint
I managed an approximately CAD $1.6 million annual operating budget, including salaries and overtime.
Budget ownership meant prioritizing staffing and overtime against service needs. It did not mean inventing a savings story beyond the operating budget I held.
In practice the hard questions looked like this:
- Do we cover this gap with overtime or contracted capacity?
- Is this vendor spend still earning its SLA?
- Which work can wait when the budget and the incident load disagree?
High-agency call: when the pager and the budget disagreed, I named the trade-off in the open. Quiet overtime creep and quiet vendor renewals are how operating spend loses management attention until Finance asks why the line moved.
Scar tissue: overtime and vendor spend become political quickly when services are noisy. The useful discipline is treating budget, coverage, and SLA performance as one decision set instead of three unrelated reports.
Vendor management was operational work
I negotiated and managed TCS and HCL contracts for after-hours staff augmentation.
Each supplier covered five resources under fixed-price and time-and-materials arrangements. I managed renewals, resource counts, SLA and KPI reviews, and performance escalations.
When contracted capacity underperforms, the service still has to be covered. Escalating performance while nights and weekends remain live is the uncomfortable part. Skipping the escalation protects the relationship and transfers the risk onto the on-call employees and the budget.
Within assigned scope I also held production change approval authority and owned related control attestations for:
- change approvals
- operational readiness
- access
- segregation of duties
- vulnerability and patch controls
Those attestations were how change authority stayed defensible to control owners. They were not optional admin layered on top of "real" work.
Earlier BMO work that informs the same pattern
As Team Lead for Online Banking discretionary application projects (December 2021 to October 2023), I built Ansible playbooks and Ansible Automation Platform Configuration as Code for an Event-Driven Ansible implementation.
It began as a Red Hat proof of concept. It was then adopted across the online banking infrastructure footprint after QA validation, and used to manage QA, performance, UAT, and production environments.
Scar tissue: a PoC that never survives contact with production gates is just theatre. Adoption required QA validation and release-gate readiness, not a demo that looked good in a slide. That is how automation actually protects release velocity: repeatable environments across 11 non-production stages, then coordinated production deployment and post-release warranty with technical readiness sign-off at applicable gates.
I led business analysts, systems analysts, and DBAs through that release path. The point for a hiring manager is not "Ansible exists on the résumé." It is that automation work had to earn its place next to real release risk.
How to use this in hiring
Use this if your mandate needs a leader who has balanced employees and contractors, managed a defined operating budget under service pressure, treated vendor performance as part of delivery, and taken change and control responsibility inside a defined scope.
Skip the transformation-program reading. This is a working description of service support leadership under constraints.
I am seeking senior technology operations or service delivery leadership roles in Canada where people, vendors, and resources are part of the same job.