IT Service and Operations Manager

IT Service and Operations Manager

Salary: £59,900. A Civil Service Pension with an employer contribution of 28.97%.

Location: Addlestone, Surrey KT15 3LS

Client Job Reference: 396058

You may not have heard of the Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD), but have you ever:

• eaten meat, eggs, fish or honey
• drunk milk
• owned a pet or animal
• taken antibiotics

If you said yes to any of the above, you are directly affected by what the VMD does.

The VMD is the regulatory and policy lead responsible for issues concerning the authorisation, use, and manufacture of veterinary medicines in the UK.

Our aim is to protect public health, animal health, and the environment, and promote animal welfare by assuring the safety, quality and effectiveness of veterinary medicines.

Find out more at: About us - Veterinary Medicines Directorate - GOV.UK

The VMD Service and IT Operations Manager will be an experienced IT professional with a passion for supporting live Service and Operations across the IT landscape. You will be a highly motivated and organised individual with significant IT Service provision experience. With support from others, you will lead a team responsible for provisioning and maintaining services across the IT estate, including legacy systems, networks, supporting hardware, software, M365, the IT Service Desk and more.

The Service and IT Operations team is responsible for the live running and maintenance of the VMD services available to users. The team will also take on the service management relationship between VMD and a managed service provider for our public facing VMD digital services.

In addition, VMD has initiated a program to incrementally replace legacy systems and migrate workloads to cloud. The delivery pipeline for this will extend over the next two to three 3 years. The Service and IT Operations Manager will play a key role in ensuring that new services are safely and securely taken on, providing assurance to the Head of IT and leading the team through change. As this transition happens, the post holder will become increasingly focused on levels of service across the VMD IT Landscape. Reporting to the Head of IT, the Service and Operations Manager will work across the organisation to drive and embed a service management culture.

Job description

As the IT Service and Operations Manager, you will agree and monitor IT service levels across all relevant business functions, managing an operations team with a user-centric support approach, focused on service availability, security and performance.

You will also ensure that:

• All service and support functions remain responsive to user needs.
• The service catalogue and wider IT service operations knowledge library is well maintained.
• Reporting and service standards are met for their specific services.
• All technical change is communicated and managed, through appropriate governance.
• A culture of continual service improvement is embedded across the Service and IT Operations team.

Main duties:

• You will be responsible for the day-to-day running of the Services and IT Operations within VMD.
• You will ensure that VMD legacy services are operating as per design, that incidents and requests are prioritised and resolved with minimal impact on our users.
• You will be confident working across the organisation and closely with the IT delivery Programme, organising, managing, and reporting on the services within scope.
• You will drive up service standards, embedding a culture of service provision and continuous improvement within VMD IT Service and Operations.
• You will lead a team responsible for the analysis of incidents, defects for legacy systems, the delivery of solutions and fixes into Live Service as well as provisioning and supporting hardware and software for business users.
• You will work collaboratively with colleagues in development projects to safely transition new services into our formal responsibility, ensuring adequate knowledge transfer, monitoring and reporting.
• You will be responsible for providing detailed input to the development of annual budget forecasts so that cost of ownership of VMD services can be accurately reported and managed down.
• You will ensure that risks and issues of the team are captured and managed with effective mitigation strategies then escalated and made visible as appropriate.
• You will provide strong leadership as an advocate for user needs, security, service, performance and improvement.
• Contributing to relevant standards’ certification e.g. ISO27001.
• Complying with ISO 9001(quality management) and ISO 27001(information security) standards, and GDPR and record management requirements.
• Acting corporately - meeting, role-modelling, embedding, and championing the corporate objectives set by the VMD.

Person specification

We’re looking for you to have experience:

• Business analysis (IT Operations) – investigating problems and opportunities in existing processes and contributing to recommending solutions to these. Working with stakeholders to identify objectives and potential benefits.
• Ownership and initiative – owning an issue until a new owner has been found or the problem has been mitigated or resolved.
• Relationship management – identifying important stakeholders and relationships and working with teams to build these. Understanding how to work with stakeholders and contributing to improving these relationships.
• Service focus – seeing the bigger picture and investigating how to get the best of underlying services.
• Service reporting – producing relevant reports in a standard format within an agreed timeframe. Working with important stakeholders to discuss any changes in the reporting process. Adding a commentary that provides am interpretation for the data set.
• Technical understanding – core technical concepts related to the role and applying with guidance. User focus – identifying needs and engaging with users or stakeholders to collate user needs evidence.
• Understanding and defining research that fits user needs. Using quantitative and qualitative data about users to turn user focus into outcomes.
• Is proficient in the use of Microsoft Office 365 packages, particularly Microsoft Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, and can learn in-house packages quickly.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Managing a Quality Service
• Changing and Improving

Technical skills

We'll assess you against these technical skills during the selection process:

• At interview, you will be assessed on your understanding of the core technical concepts related to the role, allowing you to engage with users, suppliers and the IT team at appropriate levels

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £59,900, Veterinary Medicines Directorate contributes £17,353 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides.

• Learning and development tailored to your role
• An environment with flexible working options
• A culture encouraging inclusion and diversity
• A Civil Service pension is one of the best workplace pension schemes in the UK public sector, with an average employer contribution of 28.97%
• Free onsite parking
• Free eyesight test
• Onsite gym
• Access to a prayer room

A work-life balance is key for us all. We offer flexible working as well as health, well-being and discount schemes. The annual leave package starts at 25 days per year and increases to 30 days over five years. We offer generous maternity, paternity, shared, and adoption leave.

This gives you a flavour of what’s available, but there is so much more we could mention – see Civil Service Employee Benefits, Civil Service Careers for further information.