Head Of Service Operations

Would you like to work in a supportive, collaborative and innovative company?

Do you enjoy working as part of an enthusiastic, passionate, and collaborative team?

Join our Services team

Service Operations is the control plane for live service delivery within Softcat's Services Group. It owns how work flows: how demand is received, how priority is set, how escalation happens and how major incidents are led, across every technology tower, every delivery partner and every location we deliver from.

Success. The Softcat Way.

It’s an exciting time to be at Softcat, one of the UK's most successful technology solutions businesses. We help customers to use technology to succeed, by putting our employees first. We've reached the £1 billion+ pa revenue milestone, opened our first office outside the UK and picked up a series of industry awards. We’ve got even bigger plans for the future. So, if you share our drive and ambition, get ready to achieve more from your career.

As Head of Service Operations you will lead the Unified Service Desk and build the Service Operations team alongside it from a standing start. The desk reports to you through its own management line.

As Head of Service Operations, you’ll be responsible for:

• Leading the Service Operations function, building the coordination team from a standing start and setting a culture centred on flow, evidence, accountability and operational discipline
• Owning the operational control model for live services
• Leading the Unified Service Desk through its own management line, accountable for its service levels, its workforce and shift planning and the quality of what it passes to technical teams and partners, without running it day to day
• Owning the incident, problem, change and major incident management practices and monitoring across live service
• Establishing the control plane across towers, partners and locations
• Building an operating standard that holds across time zones and delivery locations
• Ensuring every item of live work carries a named owner and a risk-based priority, and that both are set by Service Operations rather than by the team doing the resolving
• Setting the prioritisation rules, publishing them, and applying them identically to every team that delivers, Softcat’s own included, with exceptions recorded and visible rather than granted informally
• Reprioritising engineering backlogs by customer impact, risk and ageing, and holding that position with tower leadership on the strength of the evidence

We’d love you to have

• Extensive senior operational leadership experience in live service delivery, managed services or an IT service provider environment, running services for multiple customers concurrently
• Proven experience of owning operational control across a multi tower, multi team or multi partner estate, including prioritisation, escalation and flow
• Strong major incident command experience, including leading recovery under pressure and owning communications with senior stakeholders and customers
• A track record of building a function, capability or operating model from a standing start, as well as of running one that already exists
• Demonstrated ability to hold an evidenced position against senior technical and commercial stakeholders, and to be the person who says no to a poorly justified escalation
• Experience of establishing decision rights, operating rhythms and quality standards that survive contact with a busy operational environment

We also acknowledge that the confidence gap and imposter syndrome are a real thing and can get in the way of us meeting fantastic talent.

Work in a way that works for you

We recognise that everyone is different and that the way in which people want to work and deliver at their best is different for everyone too. In this…