IT Senior Service Manager

Job Title

IT Senior Service Manager

Asda House

Full time

Permanent

37.5

Competitive Salary plus benefits

IT Operations

14 September 2026

Purpose of the Role

The Senior Service Manager is accountable for Technology Service Management within an allocated Business Unit (BU), ensuring that technology services are performing, evolving and delivering value to the business, customers and colleagues.

The role acts as the senior interface between Technology and the Business, translating business priorities into service outcomes and leading a team responsible for the management of services, transition and operational run within the BU.

The Senior Service Manager combines strategic service leadership with hands-on operational credibility, ensuring services are stable, suppliers are performing, changes land safely, and improvements are continuously delivered.

Key Accountabilities

Business Unit Service Leadership

• Act as the senior Service Management leader for the Business Unit, owning the end-to-end service relationships alongside the BU leadership.
• Build and maintain trusted relationships with BU stakeholders, translating business priorities into clear service commitments.
• Own the BU service portfolio view — health, performance, risks, dependencies and roadmap.
• Represent the BU at Technology governance forums and represent Technology at BU leadership forums.
• Provide executive-friendly reporting on service performance, risks, incidents and improvements.

Service Performance & Customer Outcomes

• Own the overall performance of services within the BU — SLAs, availability, MTTR, CSAT, and incident/problem/change metrics.
• Chair Monthly Service Reviews and drive corrective action where required.
• Ensure services deliver measurable business value — customer experience, operational resilience, and colleague productivity.
• Escalate and lead the response to Major Incidents affecting the BU, providing executive communication and coordination.
• Own the incident, problem and change narrative for the BU — ensuring root causes are understood, remediated and communicated.

Service Transition & Lifecycle

• Ensure new and changed services are transitioned into live operations safely, on time and to standard.
• Own the BU transition pipeline, ensuring visibility of upcoming go-lives and operational readiness.
• Enforce Service Acceptance Criteria and Operational Readiness standards across the BU.
• Ensure services are operable, supportable and sustainable by the time they reach live running.
• Manage the warranty period post-go-live before formal handover to run.

Operational Run & Resilience

• Ensure services in live running are stable, resilient and continuously monitored.
• Ensure the BU is ready for peak trading, Bank Holidays and major events.
• Maintain strong linkage into the IT Command Centre and Major Incident function.
• Own the service risk register and drive mitigating actions.

Governance, Assurance & Continual Improvement

• Ensure the BU's services are compliant with ITSM practice standards set by Practice Owners.
• Provide assurance that processes are being followed and record quality is high.
• Own the continual improvement backlog, prioritising initiatives that drive customer, business and operational value.
• Contribute BU insight to enterprise-level practice, portfolio and governance forums.

Leadership & Team Development

• Lead, coach and develop a multi-disciplinary Service Management team within the BU.
• Set clear objectives, priorities and success measures for the team.
• Manage performance, capacity and wellbeing.
• Build a high-performing, collaborative and customer-obsessed team culture.
• Champion development, career growth and succession planning across the team.

Skills, Knowledge & Experience

Essential

• Extensive experience in senior Service Management leadership in a complex enterprise environment.
• Strong understanding of ITIL 4 practices and their application in a live enterprise context.
• Track record of influencing at senior executive and business leadership level.
• Strong experience managing service performance, incidents, problems and continual improvement.
• Excellent written and verbal communication — able to…