IT Service Delivery Lead

Do you want to be part of a force for good, helping to make life better for customers and society in the moments that matter?

At Hodge, we put people at the heart of our business, and that means our customers, colleagues and communities. Hodge is a Welsh financial services provider focused on real estate finance and specialist residential mortgage markets.

Under the overall management of the Head of Service Security & Operations, the IT Service Delivery Lead is responsible for leading the Service Improvement and Service Desk teams to ensure that applications, infrastructure and IT services are managed in line with ITIL best practice and supported within agreed SLAs.

Essential Experience:

• Relevant IT or computer science degree.
• ITIL Foundation Qualification.
• Experience of working in Service Desk or Service Delivery role.
• Experience of managing technical or project teams.
• Experience supporting applications and infrastructure.
• Knowledge of best practice and supporting tools for Service Desk and Continuous Service Improvement.
• Knowledge of Agile methodologies.

Key Responsibilities will include:

• Pro-actively manage Service Desk team to ensure issues are managed to a timely resolution.
• Ensure that customer communication for yourself and the team is clear and timely to provide appropriate updates on progress of issues.
• Ensure that the team create and maintain relevant documentation on work undertaken. Work with the team to engage with external suppliers and internal development teams to manage issues to resolution.
• Manage the resource needed to ensure day-to-day service delivery meets customer requirements; monitoring the workload of the support team to feed into capacity planning.
• Monitoring and active management of the support queues to ensure issues are being progressed as appropriate.
• Ensure that the support team meet SLA targets for response and resolution of incidents and provide reporting on SLAs including response and resolution times, service availability, incident and service requests and suppliers.
• Act as a technical escalation point for the support team for more challenging issues and customer escalation.
• Input into the Change Management processes and act as core member of Change Approval Board.
• Own the Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Monitoring and Event
• Management processes and any associated processes and practices, ensuring that processes are fit for purpose and deliver required outcomes
• Own the Asset Management processes and any associated processes and practices, ensuring that processes are fit for purpose and deliver required outcomes
• Manage assigned suppliers in line with Hodge Supplier management framework and develop good working relationships with all key suppliers.
• Ensure that risks are considered as part of work undertaken by yourself and the team and that any assigned risks are managed appropriately.
• Define and implement Service Transition principles and processes for all services moving to Live environment.
• Work with business and IT stakeholders to ensure Service Transition process and reporting align with short and longer-term goals.
• Work with software and delivery teams to embed Service Transition activity across development and infrastructure projects.
• Manage the Service Improvement backlog to ensure appropriate visibility, prioritisation and allocation of resource.
• Develop a reporting framework across Service Improvement backlog, work completed and improvements made.
• Ensure that Service Improvement and Transition processes align to and can be benchmarked against relevant best practice standards (e.g. ITIL).
• Ensure work includes appropriate quality controls mechanisms (e.g. reliability patterns, health-checks and relevant monitoring).
• Provide release management and technical support for core business applications and infrastructure to ensure they are up to date and tested appropriately prior to deployment.
• Understand core architectural patterns and frameworks used by Hodge.
• Define and implement processes to ensure that the IT Service Knowledge Base is relevant, accurate and kept up to date.
• Engage with Service Delivery colleagues to ensure that Change Management processes are robust and support Service Transition processes.
• Understand key business processes that software supports.
• Understand the wider economic environment in which Hodge operates.
• Embed Continuous Improvement practices into all elements of Service Delivery activity.
• Actively investigate and trial Continuous Improvement principles and practices.
• Pro-actively improve team performance through formalised and informal knowledge sharing.
• Advise and coach other team members to aid their technical and team development.
• Pro-actively investigate technology landscape and best practice to identify improvements.
• Engage with external parties and tech community to share and improve knowledge.
• Identify and progress for yourself and the team formal training and certification in relevant technologies and disciplines.
• Take ownership of Problem Management, implementing root cause fixes and identifying potential problems before they impact Services.
• Develop IT Key Performance indicators (KPIs) and service level information to help IT make data driven decision around business partnering and continuous service improvement.
• Help the business understand how IT tools can help them become more efficient and better achieve their goals.
• Identify business processes and opportunities for improvement, utilizing existing IT tools and methods such as automation.
• Understand the specific goals of the overall business and individual departments, and how IT can help them achieve them.
• Line Management responsibility for Service Desk roles, Application Support and Incident & Problem Lead.
• Demonstrate a deep understanding of relevant frameworks, tools and languages.
• Ensure appropriate quality controls are embedded, adhered to and improved.
• Ensure appropriate documentation is maintained to support current and future activity.
• Work with IS Service Delivery and Development teams to assist in the investigation and resolution of live issues and to support BAU activity.

Please be aware that should we pursue your application, all our Financial Services employees will be expected to complete background checks to assess suitability for employment, these include; a criminal record, identity, media, sanctions, adverse finance, fraud prevention and reference checks to comply with our regulatory requirements.

Hodge is an advocate of being an equal opportunities employer, We believe in promoting equality and diversity which is central to our lives today. We welcome applications from all sections of the community and recognises the value a diverse workforce brings to an organisation.

ESG and sustainability are at the heart of everything we do and serves as a reminder of the responsibility we have to our stakeholders, customers, colleagues and the communities we operate in to use our position wisely. We're currently exploring different certifications available and have done an initial review of how we think we'd fare, as we see this as a real opportunity for Hodge given our social purpose.

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