Support Manager

Due to continued business growth, we are looking for a Support Manager to oversee the day to day activities of service desk operations to ensure Customers and Service Desk teams receive the support they require.

The Support Manager monitors operations to make sure tickets are addressed in a timely manner, as well as serving as the liaison between Service Desk and Customer for major business-impacting incidents.

The Support Manager is also the leader of the service-management function that processes a large volume of service requests each day. The Support Manager is responsible for smooth operations, ensuring that SLAs are being fulfilled and ensures that customer expectations are met or exceeded by ensuring that staff are meeting performance metrics/benchmarks, and that standards and processes are followed and protocol observed to provide effective customer service and meet requirements through an ITIL framework.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of Support Manager are split across Service Operations, Continuous Improvement and General Management activities as follows: –

• Management of the Service Desk team who telephone and remote on-line support to Customers in line with SLA’s

• Acting as the point of escalation for Service Desk related tickets and provides updates to the customer and (senior) manager(s) on progress of the incident.

• Leading pre-emptive investigation and resolution of system alerts before they cause outages

• Leads major incident teams and ensures the team is adequately resourced with the required skillset in order to provide a workaround or resolve the incident.

• Works with the Major Incident team to determine root-cause, review/approve the RCA report.

• Leads incident reviews and ensures output from the review is documented and actioned.

• Operational performance monitoring – analyse the Service Desk trends and performance then initiates changes to improve quality and efficiency wherever possible striving for continuous improvement of the Service Desk team.

• Manages the transition/handover of projects into the Service Desk team for BAU support.

• Enforce systems use, policies, procedures and standards across the team.

• Fronting the relationship between Service Desk and the Professional services function and working Delivery/Project Managers to ensure tickets that require development or consultancy resources are progressed.

• Involvement in projects and initiatives involving service design, customer contact strategy.
• Team management including arranging and leading regular team meetings/updates, mentoring, carrying out regular one to one’s and staff scheduling.
• Working with PS delivery manager/project managers to plan and schedule the deployment of software releases to Customers’ systems.

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Qualifications

• Ideally a degree in Computer Science, Business & Information Systems or similar, however other disciplines will be considered as experience, attitude and aptitude are equally important.
• ITIL Certification

Work Experience

• Flexibility be “on-call” to manage escalations and major incidents coordination to meet support obligations and SLAs.

• Skilled problem-solving capabilities with the desire and proven ability to create innovative solutions.

• Have a positive attitude to customer problems and incidents in a high-pressured environment

• The ability to multitask across multiple incidents and customers

• Understanding of SLA management

• Ability to follow process and procedures accurately

• 2-3 years’ experience working as an IT system manager, Applications Support Manager or Service Desk Manager.

• Working knowledge of Service Desk Applications (familiarity with Freshdesk, Zendesk, ServiceNow, Jira)

• General management experience including management of people, budgets, schedules and business relationships

Competencies

• Skilled problem solving capabilities – with the desire and proven ability to create innovative solutions.

• Leadership – ability to encourage effective team working by seeking input from team members and will support team members (technically and operationally) in achieving continuous improvement by encouraging ideas and recommendations for procedural, operational and system improvements. Motivating, coaching and developing the team members

• Knowledgeable – Actively maintains and develops knowledge about key developments in areas of expertise; establishes processes or routines to regularly obtain business intelligence on new trends, technologies and developments; sees challenges as opportunities to learn and uses or initiates experiences to enhance skills and behaviour; proactively seeks on-the-job development.

• Communication – must be able to get messages understood clearly by adopting a range of styles both written and verbal. Recognising the importance of sharing and disseminating information and contacts is key.

• Prioritisation – must possess the ability to work in an environment with changing priorities.

• Proactive – a proactive approach to work and be able to identify issues before they happen and recommend procedures to prevent reoccurrence.

• Attitude – A can-do attitude and sense of urgency for a high growth/ fast paced environment; must demonstrate the ability to self-start and show desire to drive issues through to resolution.

• Adaptability and flexibility – must display a willingness to be flexible in meeting the challenge of working across a diverse range of products and platforms.

• Relationships – must be capable of building and maintaining strong relationships; providing support and guidance where required, also must apply the same effectiveness to working relationships with a range of people across the team and organisation; effectively influences within and outside the team.