Service Delivery Manager - SC Clearance Holder

Active Security Clearance Applicants only! Applicants must be sole UK nationals only.

Start - asap

Duration - 6 months to start, project likely 3-4 years

Location - Hybrid (2 days per week in Reading once office up and running)

Accountable for global service performance and customer experience across the Service Management operating model. The role provides a single senior point of accountability for service outcomes across the United Kingdom, Italy and Japan, integrating the contribution of teams, client teams and third-party suppliers.

• Own the end-to-end service management relationship and provide clear accountability for global service outcomes, without displacing the contractual accountability of individual service providers.
• Lead global service reviews, performance governance and executive reporting, ensuring that trends, risks, dependencies, decisions and improvement commitments are visible and acted upon.
• Set the service performance approach for SLAs, XLAs and supporting operational measures, ensuring that service reporting reflects user experience as well as contractual performance.
• Coordinate regional delivery teams so that local priorities, language needs, national controls and stakeholder concerns are represented in global governance.
• Maintain oversight of the cross-supplier service improvement plan, agree priorities with authorised stakeholders and track benefits through to evidenced completion.
• Act as the senior escalation point for material service issues and critical incidents, working within agreed governance, security and approval guardrails.
• Own demand forecasting, capacity planning and service scaling, ensuring the operating model expands in line with user growth, new locations, services, suppliers and security domains.
• Ensure demand, capacity and service growth are reviewed regularly as users, locations, suppliers, applications and security domains are added.
• Support service catalogue and onboarding governance so new services and partners enter the model through controlled, repeatable routes.
• Promote consistent knowledge, reporting and handover practices across regions while respecting classification boundaries and national handling requirements.
• Provide commercial awareness in service discussions, identifying scope or demand changes for formal assessment rather than informally absorbing unapproved obligations.
• Lead service mobilisation, transition and country expansion activities, ensuring readiness criteria, governance controls and acceptance requirements are achieved before service responsibility transfers.
• Oversee delivery of ITIL-aligned service management practices including Incident, Major Incident, Problem, Change, Knowledge, Capacity, Availability, Service Level Management and Continual Improvement.
• Maintain the single operational view across teams, client teams and third-party suppliers, ensuring dependencies, risks, actions and decisions remain visible and actively managed through to closure.
• Ensure Service Now remains the authoritative operational system of record for service workflows, reporting, governance, supplier hand-offs and service performance management.
• Ensure service governance, reporting and operational practices comply with applicable security, sovereignty, information-sharing and national handling requirements.

• Significant experience leading service delivery in a complex, multi-supplier or enterprise environment
• Experience in defence, aerospace, government or another security-regulated environment
• Strong working knowledge of ITIL 4 service management and service integration principles
• Experience of global or tri-country service delivery
• Demonstrable executive stakeholder management, governance and escalation leadership
• Practical exposure to XLAs, SIAM and continual improvement governance
• Ability to interpret service, risk, security and commercial information and turn it into clear decisions
• ITIL 4 Managing Professional, Strategic Leader or equivalent
• Experience managing service performance across more than one location or provider
• Experience operating with Service Now or a comparable enterprise ITSM platform