We're looking for a Senior Service Delivery Manager to lead and direct the Service Delivery function at Irwin Mitchell. In this role, you'll be responsible for embedding, standardising and delivering service excellence across our IT estate, ensuring high-quality service delivery to both internal and external customers while maximising value from suppliers and internal teams.

You'll lead a team of Service Delivery Managers who act as the interface between the CIO function, business stakeholders and key IT suppliers. The team plays a crucial role in ensuring a clear understanding of customer satisfaction levels, business expectations and the services being delivered.

Working closely with stakeholders across the business, you'll provide leadership in balancing service demand with available capacity, champion continuous improvement initiatives and drive the maturity of the Service Delivery function. Success in the role will be measured in part through ongoing service improvements and maturity assessments using recognised third-party frameworks such as Gartner.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead and manage the Service Delivery Management function and the Service Delivery Managers aligned to business units.
• Manage key Service Delivery suppliers and outsourced service providers, ensuring services are delivered in line with business requirements and contractual SLAs.
• Drive service maturity improvements and continuous service improvement initiatives across the IT service portfolio.
• Act as a key representative of Operational IT, supporting service improvements, escalations and the delivery of the firm's "Silent Service" principle.
• Work collaboratively with business leaders, divisional heads, executive stakeholders and operational teams to deliver service strategies that support the wider CIO technology strategy.
• Lead incident and problem management activities, ensuring issues are investigated, resolved and lessons learned are implemented.
• Create and chair service reviews, producing management reporting and ensuring service actions are tracked through to completion.
• Support procurement and vendor management activities, ensuring service requirements are built into contracts and that suppliers deliver against agreed commitments.
• Produce briefing papers, communications and information packs for audiences ranging from senior leaders to firmwide distribution.
• Identify opportunities to improve service quality, customer satisfaction and operational efficiency while reducing service costs where appropriate.
• Sponsor and support key service improvement and IT change initiatives.
• Participate in the IT Duty Manager escalation rota and support major incident and crisis management activities when required.
• Provide coaching, leadership and development opportunities to members of the Service Delivery team.
• Deputise for the Head of Service Delivery as required, including representation at senior governance and executive forums.

• Strong understanding of Service Delivery principles and best practice.
• Experience of Supplier and Service Management.
• Experience creating and reviewing Statements of Requirements (SoRs), Invitations to Tender (ITTs) and Statements of Work (SoWs).
• Knowledge of ITIL processes.
• Degree-level education or equivalent experience.
• Excellent communication, influencing and stakeholder management skills with the confidence to challenge constructively where needed.
• The ability to build long-term strategic relationships with senior stakeholders.
• Strong leadership skills with the ability to motivate, inspire and develop individuals and teams.
• Strong planning and organisational skills, managing multiple priorities and deadlines effectively.
• Sound decision-making skills and the ability to assess complex situations and escalate issues appropriately.
• The ability to thrive in a complex, fast-moving technology environment.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• ITIL v4 certification or accreditation desirable