IT Service Support Manager in Preston

Fully Office-Based in Preston

Salary circa £45k - £50k DOE + Annual Bonus

A glance at the role:

We are looking to welcome an experienced IT Service Support Manager to lead and develop a future-ready service desk and digital workplace capability that delivers high-quality, secure, and resilient services. You will build and drive experience-led outcomes (XLAs) alongside SLAs, automate the routine, shift left with strong knowledge management (KCS), and align operations with ITIL 4 practices and the SDI Service Desk Manager Standard. Partner across IT, 3rd Parties, and wider business teams to support digital transformation and continuous service improvement and develop and support your direct reports. This position looks to make sure our colleagues can use enabling technologies to put LPPA members at the centre of what we do as a company.

A bit about us:

Local Pensions Partnership Administration (LPPA) is a multi-award-winning organisation and one of the UK’s leading pension administration companies. We strive to deliver the best experience for over 2,100 employers and more than 700,000 members of Local Government, Police and Firefighter pension schemes, keeping them fully informed about their pensions whilst working closely with employers to continuously educate and support them.

What we can offer you:

• Competitive salary £45k - £50k DOE & inclusion in Annual Bonus scheme.
• 25 days holiday, plus bank holidays and 2 additional concessionary days and a half day for your Birthday, with the ability to buy and sell leave.
• Access to an excellent pension scheme (Local Government Pension Scheme) with generous employer contributions.
• Access to Health or Dental Plan.
• Access to our Enhanced Employee Assistance Programme for when you or your family might need some support.
• Access to our bespoke Reward Discount Scheme - Your Perk Site.
• Opportunities to attend Wellbeing webinars and social events.
• Daily free fruit and snacks available to you in our office.
• Free Car Parking in Preston City Centre.

What you’ll be doing:

• Own the Service Desk as the single point of contact (SPOC), covering incidents, requests, problems, major incidents, and communications.
• Define, track, and improve SLAs and XLAs (employee experience, sentiment, FCR); publish transparent, business-aligned dashboards.
• Establish Major Incident Management routines (war rooms, comms cadence, post-incident reviews) and embed problem management to remove recurring issues.
• Implement AI technologies, virtual agents, and workflow automation (ServiceNow / Power Platform) to reduce manual effort and speed resolution.
• Drive shift left strategies: robust self-service portal, knowledge articles and guided workflows that enable end users and first line teams to resolve more without escalation.
• Introduce proactive support (monitoring, trend/pattern analysis, automation triggers) to prevent incidents and improve stability.
• Build a KCS programme: article lifecycle, quality reviews, and coaching; make knowledge updates part of done criteria for tickets and changes.
• Run a CSI backlog (ITIL 4); report value delivered (defect removal, time saved, sentiment uplift).
• Lead cloud-based endpoint management and zero touch provisioning (e.g., modern EUC approaches) to improve reliability, speed onboarding, and reduce TCO (Intune / Autopilot).
• Govern SaaS lifecycle (access, licensing, joiners/movers/leavers) and ensure seamless collaboration experiences (M365/Teams/SharePoint) with strong knowledge and self-help.
• Chair CAB; embed risk-based change practices, automated approvals where appropriate, and robust go live / readiness with service acceptance (docs, support models, runbooks).
• Partner with Security teams on access controls, MFA conditional access posture, and secure service operations (comms & processes aligned to major incident/security incident playbooks).
• Responsibility for driving Value for money from end user compute devices and their lifecycle.
• Communicate service health and roadmap to business stakeholders; co-create service catalogue offerings and request models that reflect business value.
• Communicate clearly to ensure team members are working harmoniously and to the same standard.
• Undertake full responsibility for the management and development of the team.

What we need from you:

• A genuine desire to provide excellent services to colleagues and a real drive to improve those services to be the best they can be.
• Strong interpersonal skills, with the ability to work with users from across the organisation, building relationships to improve service delivery.
• Proven leadership of a modern service desk aligned to ITIL 4 practices (incident, request, problem, change, service catalogue).
• Demonstrable automation/AI implementation in ITSM tooling (e.g., virtual agents, workflow automation, intelligent routing).
• Hands-on understanding of digital workplace/EUC operations in cloud first environments and M365 ecosystem.
• Broad knowledge of the following: Desktop PC; Laptops; Active Directory administration; Office 365; MS Teams; Microsoft productivity tools; Software as a Service; Cloud Telephony.

Nice to have:

• Certifications: ITIL 4, SDI.
• Experience with ITSM tools, ServiceNow administration, and data driven reporting.
• Familiarity with product-based service ownership and iterative improvement.

Working with and upholding our values:

• Working together
• Committed to excellence
• Doing the right thing
• Forward thinking