Service Lifecycle Manager - Digital in Bury

Established in 1981 with a single store in the Northwest of England, the JD Group is a leading omni-channel retailer of Sports Fashion, Outdoors and Gyms with our colleagues working in stores across several retail fascias in many markets around the world. JD Sports Fashion Plc was listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1996 and has been a FTSE100 publicly quoted company since 2019 and continues to grow in the UK and internationally. We want to be the leading global omnichannel retailer in the sports and outdoor industry. To be a part of this successful company and help us to achieve this you will have the desire to ingrain our strategic goals of being a people-led, innovative and customer-focused organisation which provides operational excellence whilst identifying new areas of growth as part of our day to day objectives.

About the role

As a Service Lifecycle Manager, you are the guardian of JD Sports’ production eCommerce environment. This is a highly technical role designed to ensure our complex digital ecosystem operates optimally. You will manage the performance of internal teams and third-party providers, driving the governance of monitoring, incident, and problem management. You must be tenacious and firm with suppliers, possess the technical grit to oversee complex platform integrations, and have the analytical mind to spot patterns in ticket data as well as monitoring data before they become outages. This role requires rapid context-switching and the ability to lead during high-pressure major incidents.

Responsibilities

• Service Lifecycle & Strategy

• End-to-End Ownership: Own the full lifecycle of monitoring, incident, and problem management services from strategy to execution.
• Service Transition: Lead transition activities to ensure new services and technologies meet "Operational Readiness" criteria before go-live.
• Process Engineering: Create and update existing processes to streamline how the team operates and improve the outsourced execution layer.

• Major Incident Leadership: Coordinate and lead major incidents or high-pressure escalations, providing clear, authoritative communication.
• Root Cause Analysis (RCA): Undertake deep-dive RCA following incidents, producing reports with remedial actions to present to senior management.
• Pattern Recognition: Proactively monitor ticket flows and alerting channels to spot trends and systemic issues, shifting the team from reactive to proactive.
• Out-of-Hours Support: Participate in an on-call rotation to ensure 24/7 service continuity for our global digital platforms.
• Tenacious Vendor Management: Be firm with third-party suppliers and outsourced teams to ensure adherence to SLAs and KPIs.
• Contract Management: Oversee contracts, lead negotiations for renewals/amendments, and monitor vendor performance to ensure high-quality service.
• Compliance: Establish and maintain SLAs and OLAs, ensuring compliance with internal policies and industry regulations.

• Monitoring & Capacity: Ensure robust monitoring is in place to identify issues proactively and manage capacity to meet business demands.
• Dynamic Reporting: Produce weekly/monthly performance reports and be able to pull complex data together at short notice for senior leadership.
• Continuous Improvement: Use data-driven insights to implement initiatives that enhance service efficiency and delivery.

• Relationship Management: Build strong relationships with product teams and business units to align service delivery with business objectives.
• Multi-Priority Juggling: Navigate a complex ecosystem of multiple platforms, demonstrating the ability to context-switch and manage multiple priorities simultaneously.
• Team Mentorship: Lead and develop a high-performing team, fostering a culture of collaboration and accountability.

Skills and Experience

• Required Technical Expertise:

• Highly Technical Background: You must possess a deep understanding of technical architectures (e.g., APIs, Cloud, eCommerce platforms, and monitoring tools). You aren’t just managing tickets; you are understanding the tech behind them.
• Substantial eCommerce Experience: Proven experience managing a high-volume eCommerce support function. You understand the unique pressures of peak trade and global digital retail.
• ITIL Mastery: Strong understanding of ITIL frameworks and best practices, specifically in a digital-first environment.

• Supplier Tenacity: Demonstrated ability to be firm and assertive with third-party providers to get work done.
• Analytical Detective Work: Ability to analyse large sets of ticket data to identify patterns and root causes.
• Communication: Excellent interpersonal skills with the ability to present technical RCA reports to non-technical senior management.
• Resilience: Ability to remain calm and lead during major outages, while managing the need for occasional out-of-hours work.

Success in this role will be measured by:

• Stability: Reduction in incident response and resolution times (MTTR).
• Proactivity: Improvement in problem resolution and reduction of recurring incidents via RCA.
• Operational Readiness: Successful integration of new services and projects into the operational environment with minimal disruption.
• Feedback: Improvement in customer satisfaction scores related to service delivery.
• Performance: Effective management of third-party providers and internal teams.
• Vendor Management: Adherence to and maintenance of SLAs, OLAs, and other service commitments by third-party execution layers.

We know our colleagues work tirelessly to make JD Sports the success it is today and in turn, we offer them some amazing benefits including staff discount on JD Group and other brands within the organisation and personal development opportunities to learn and develop at work.