IT Service Design and Transition Manager

About the role

What if your next IT role gave you the opportunity to shape how new technology is introduced across a diverse organisation, connect project delivery with operational support, and make sure important services are ready to perform from the moment they go live?

At Lincolnshire Co-op, technology supports a varied family of businesses and services, from our food stores and pharmacies to our funeral homes, travel branches, warehouses and Support Centre teams.

Introducing new technology successfully takes more than completing a project. Services need to be supportable, resilient and operationally ready, with the right knowledge, monitoring and processes in place before they are handed over.

As our Service Design and Transition Manager, you’ll bridge the gap between project delivery and business-as-usual support. You’ll work with projects from their earliest stages, making sure operational requirements are understood and every new or changed service moves into the live environment in a controlled, well-documented and proportionate way.

You’ll establish and lead an ITIL 4-aligned approach to service design, transition and acceptance across our IT project portfolio.

In this role, you will:

• Engage with projects from initiation, making sure supportability, monitoring, resilience and operational requirements are considered from the outset.
• Own and maintain practical service design standards, templates and service catalogue information.
• Represent business-as-usual support during service design and delivery, ensuring operational risks and support requirements inform project decisions.
• Lead service acceptance and go-live readiness reviews, with clear entry, exit and approval criteria.
• Coordinate knowledge transfer between project and support teams, including runbooks, known errors, monitoring and support documentation.
• Plan and manage early-life support arrangements before overseeing the formal handover into steady-state service.
• Maintain transition risk logs and elevate unresolved readiness concerns ahead of go-live.
• Provide clear reporting on transition progress, risks, decisions and outcomes.
• Review post-go-live incidents, early-life support and colleague feedback to improve future transitions.
• Build strong relationships across project delivery, the PMO, applications, infrastructure, service operations and the wider business.

You’ll be supported by colleagues across IT, project delivery and the wider Society who share a commitment to introducing change effectively and providing dependable services for our colleagues, customers and members.

You may already be working in service design or transition, or you might be an experienced IT service management professional looking for an opportunity to shape a more consistent approach across a complex organisation.

What matters most to us is your ability to connect technical delivery with operational reality, bring people together and make sure services are genuinely ready before they go live.

You’ll probably recognise yourself in this if:

• You have significant experience in IT service management, service design or service transition within a medium-to-large IT environment.
• You have managed handovers from project delivery into live operational support.
• You have a strong working knowledge of ITIL 4, particularly its service design and transition practices.
• You have led readiness reviews, service acceptance processes or go-live governance.
• You’re confident influencing project teams and constructively challenging where operational requirements haven’t been met.
• You can create clear, practical standards, processes and documentation that colleagues will use.
• You’re comfortable interpreting incident and support data and using it to improve future outcomes.
• You communicate clearly with technical and non-technical colleagues at every level.
• You’re organised and able to manage several service transitions, risks and priorities at the same time.
• You build positive working relationships without losing sight of accountability, service quality or operational readiness.

Experience with in a retail, multi‑site or high‑availability environment would be helpful, as…