Sword is a leading provider of business technology solutions within the Energy, Public and Finance Sectors, driving real transformation change within our clients. We use proven technology, specialist teams and domain expertise to build solid technical foundations across platforms, data and business applications. We have a passion for using technology to solve business problems, working in partnership with our clients to help in achieving their goals.
About The Role:
A genuinely exciting and rare opportunity for an experienced and forward-thinking Service Operations Manager to lead our end-to-end IT Service Operations. This role is accountable for delivering exceptional customer experience while ensuring a motivated, engaged, and high-performing Service team. Acting as the Service owner, you will drive operational excellence, embed ITIL and ISO 20000 best practices, and shape a culture of continuous improvement, innovation, and employee satisfaction.
Here's What The Role Looks Like:
You will set the strategy and vision for service operations, mature existing processes, and act as a senior escalation point for both internal and external stakeholders. With a balance of commercial awareness, people leadership, and service management expertise, you will ensure services are cost-effective, scalable, and aligned to both customer and business objectives.
Service Leadership:
- Act as the overall service owner for Service Operations, accountable for customer experience, operational performance, and continual improvement.
- Drive end-to-end service delivery across design, transition, development, operations, and continual improvement in line with ITIL best practices.
- Champion the adoption and maturity of ITIL-aligned processes and ISO 20000 standards, ensuring audit readiness and embedding these into daily operations.
Operational Excellence:
- Analyse and drive improvements across service operations performance, including ticket trends, response times, SLA compliance, and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).
- Develop, track and report on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for service quality, efficiency and customer satisfaction.
- Identify, design, and implement process and automation improvements that reduce manual effort, increase operational efficiency, and enhance both the customer and employee experience.
- Translate service performance data into actionable insights and executive reporting to support decision-making.
Customer Focus:
- Understand client needs across multiple disciplines, ensuring services are fully aligned while consistently meeting and exceeding agreed SLAs and KPIs.
- Act as the senior escalation point for major client issues, ensuring effective resolution and communication.
- Ensure best practice communication with client users within ITSM tool for incidents, requests and updates.
- Work with Customer Experience Managers to align service delivery with client expectations, and contractual obligations, and assist in producing meaningful and actionable insights and service measures to improve and grow customer accounts.
Team Management & Development:
- Lead, coach, and develop service operations employees and team leads, fostering a culture of accountability, technical excellence, wellbeing and customer first thinking.
- Set clear expectations, provide regular feedback, and support professional growth, ensuring high levels of employee satisfaction (ESAT/eNPS).
- Ensure adequate capacity and capability across the team to meet customer demand and strategic objectives.
Governance & Compliance:
- Ensure compliance with ISO 20000, cybersecurity, data privacy and regulatory requirements.
- Ensure consistent process execution across service operations to protect SLA integrity and reporting accuracy.
- Identify, own, and deliver service and business improvements, managing them end-to-end.
Success In The Role Will Be Measured By:
- SLA/OLA compliance across all services.
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT/NPS) and feedback trends.
- Employee satisfaction (ESAT/eNPS) and retention within service operations.
- Demonstrable efficiency improvements through automation, AI, and process maturity.
- Progression of ISO 20000 adoption and ITIL process maturity.
Requirements
Technical Experience & Skills:
- ITIL Foundation (v4) or higher certification.
- Experience of contributing to the design and implementation of new service processes.
- Experience leading IT service operations within an MSP environment.
- Experience of working with ServiceNow.
- Experience with RMM tools (such as N-able) for delivering scalable, proactive IT support.
- Exposure to automation and AI solutions to enhance operational efficiencies.
- Strong technical adaptability with the ability to learn and apply emerging technologies.
Professional Competencies:
- Strategic Thinking - ability to think ahead, anticipate challenges, and align service delivery with business goals.
- Customer Focus - Deep understanding of customer needs and ability to manage competing priorities.
- Delivering Results - Strong focus on achieving KPI's, SLAs, and service outcomes.
- Managing People - Coaching, motivating and developing service desk teams to perform effectively by setting clear expectations, accountability and ownership.
- Commercial Awareness - Understanding of profitability, cost control and value creation.
- Continual Improvement - Ability to identify and implement service enhancements and process efficiencies.
- Collaboration - Working effectively across departments and with external stakeholders.
- Confidence & Influence - Projecting credibility and leading with authority in client and internal engagements.
Benefits
At Sword, our core values and culture are based on caring about our people, investing in training and career development and building inclusive teams where we are all encouraged to contribute to achieve success.
We Offer Comprehensive Benefits Designed To Support Your Professional Development And Enhance Your Overall Quality Of Life. In Addition To a
Competitive Salary, Here's What You Can Expect As Part Of Our Benefits Package:
Personalised Career Development: We create a development plan customised to your goals and aspirations, with a range of learning and development opportunities within a culture that encourages growth.
Flexible working: Flexible work arrangements to support your work-life balance. We can't promise to always be able to meet every request, however are keen to discuss your individual preferences to make it work where we can.
A Fantastic Benefits Package: This includes generous annual leave allowance, enhanced family friendly benefits, pension scheme, access to private health, well-being, and insurance schemes, an employee assistance programme, discounted cash plan and more.....
At Sword we are dedicated to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace and are proud to be an equal opportunities employer, ensuring that all applicants receive fair and equal consideration for employment, regardless of whether they meet every requirement. If you don't tick all the boxes but feel you have some of the relevant skills and experience we're looking for, please do consider applying and highlight your transferable skills and experience. We embrace diversity in all its forms, valuing individuals regardless of age, disability, gender identity or reassignment, marital or civil partner status, pregnancy or maternity status, race, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation. Your perspective and potential are important to us.
If we can do anything to help make the hiring process more accessible, please let our talent acquisition team know when you apply so we can support any adjustments.
