Service Management Team Lead in Manchester

Location: Hybrid - Manchester or Leeds 3 days per week

Salary: From £41,400

Who we are: interactive investor is an award-winning investment platform that puts its customers in control of their financial future. We’ve been helping investors for nearly 30 years. We’re now the UK’s number one flat-fee investment platform, with assets under administration approaching £75 billion and over 500,000 customers.

Purpose of the Role: You will be leading our Service Management Analysts, responsible for delivering a high-quality service to our business users and customers, managing daily operations. As a hands-on Team Lead, you will be responsible for leading and motivating your team, handling escalations, monitoring performance, ensuring team compliance with service level agreements (SLAs). You will also be required to develop service improvements and maintain strong relationships to drive successful outcomes.

Leading a diverse team in an ITIL environment, you will have responsibilities for, but not limited to:

• Major Incident Planning & Management
• Problem & Change Management
• Service Transition
• Business Continuity Planning & Management

The role will require out-of-hours working which may include evening, late night, weekend and/or bank holiday working to support on-call Duty Manager rota, and/or service implementations, which is renumerated separately.

Key Responsibilities:

• Building relationships at all levels of the business and with 3rd parties, facilitating meetings as needed with key stakeholders, ensuring all required resources, approvers and decision makers are present and engaged to support activities across the service management function.
• Ensure effective and timely communication is maintained with key stakeholders, escalating risks, including risks to milestones, as needed.
• Own and implement the service management processes, ensuring they continue to drive best practice and ITIL standardisation.
• Assist with the reporting of Key Control and Key Risk Indicators, SLAs and other reporting as needed, ensuring information is recorded accurately and timely, managing risks, actions and events through the firm’s risk management platform.
• To be proactive in identifying areas for improvements, with possible solutions obtained from technical teams for department or business unit.
• Manage risks across the department, highlighting areas of concern, escalating as needed.
• Ensure services are planned and implemented safely with issues resolved.
• Management of the businesses test environments, ensuring they’re suitably maintained to support the business’s development and testing.
• Maintain the firm's ability to contact colleagues in the event of an emergency.

INCIDENT & PROBLEM MANAGEMENT:

• Coordination, ownership and management of major incidents, to restore a normal service of operation as quickly as possible and to minimise impact on business operations, ensuring the best possible levels of service quality and availability are maintained, including incidents relating to implementations.
• Act as duty manager, working with technical specialists to deal with any serious incidents out of hours, escalating as needed.
• Own the investigation into critical and/or complex incidents, working with key stakeholders to identify the root cause, ensuring suitable fixes have been identified and implemented.
• Share information on known problems and issues.

CHANGE, SERVICE TRANSITION & IMPLEMENTATION MANAGEMENT:

• Own the change process from start to finish, ensuring all requests meet the required standards, suitable approvals have been obtained and the change has been implemented in line with process, taking a holistic risk view to ensure competing changes do not cause incidents.
• Own the service transition process to ensure a smooth transition of services deployed into the live environment, ensuring changes are managed effectively and efficiently, confirming all required documentation and training required for successful delivery of the project is agreed and in place, and handed over to BAU in a controlled manner.
• Work with PMO and other key stakeholders to ensure the service transition process is embedded into their delivery model and culture.

PEOPLE MANAGEMENT:

• Lead a team of professionals, in the delivery of areas of accountability.
• Ensure team accountability and ownership of tasks, providing support and escalation as needed.
• Recruit, coach, develop, motivate, and manage the performance of the team to deliver defined objectives.
• Motivate your team, fostering a sense of collaboration and accountability.
• Support and guide team members through clear objectives, SLAs, providing development and upskilling opportunities.

Essential Requirements:

• At least 2 years of line management experience.
• At least 5 years of experience in the ITIL driven service management environment, with specific Major Incident Management experience.
• Excellent understanding of corporate production IT Environment and IT Operations.
• Demonstrable experience of effectively communicating at the technical and business management level.
• Demonstrable ability to work under pressure, with the ability to prioritise, managing multiple items and stakeholders at the same time to tight timeframes whilst remaining calm in sometimes challenging situations.
• Strong matrix management leadership skills.

Desirable Requirements:

• ITIL v4 Foundation in Service Management.
• Experience of working as part of business continuity planning and management.
• Strong analytical skills.
• Ability to produce reports and presentations suitable for multi-level audiences.
• Ability to think logically and creatively when addressing a problem.
• Good judgment in seeking and providing advice and counsel, independent of direct management oversight.
• Demonstrated ability to effectively coordinate resolution efforts for escalated issues.
• Understanding the business impacts of critical situations.

Benefits:

• Group Personal Pension Plan– 8% employer contribution and 4% employee contribution.
• Life Assurance and Group Income Protection.
• Private Medical Insurance– Provided by Bupa.
• 25 Days Annual Leave, plus bank holidays.
• Staff Discounts on our investment products.
• Personal & Well-being Fund– Supporting your physical and mental wellness.
• Retail Discounts– Savings at a wide range of high street and online retailers.
• Voluntary Flexible Benefits– Tailor your benefits to suit your lifestyle.

Please Note: We will do our utmost efforts to respond to all applicants. However, due to the high volume of applications we are currently receiving, if you haven't been contacted within 30 days of application, please consider unsuccessful. interactive investor operates in accordance with the UK Equality Act 2010. We welcome applications from individuals of all ages, disabilities, gender identities, marital status, pregnancy/maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation. We are committed to treating all applicants fairly and making reasonable adjustments where needed to support disabled applicants. We actively prevent all forms of discrimination, harassment, and victimisation—whether direct, indirect, associative, or perceptive.