Senior Service Manager in Farnborough

Are you an experienced Service Management leader who has successfully led large, complex services and teams within demanding, secure environments? Sopra Steria’s Aerospace, Defence and Security business is looking for a Senior Service Manager to take ownership of a large and growing service, providing leadership across a broad Service Management capability, and helping shape how the service develops over the coming years. The service is still evolving and going through significant transformation, giving you the opportunity to put your own stamp on it, define its future direction and build a service that delivers real value to our customer.

You will also play a senior role within our wider Service Management capability, helping develop our existing teams and contributing to the future direction of Service Management across the UK business. This role requires the successful candidate to hold active MoD security clearance and be within a commutable distance of Farnborough. The role offers a hybrid working arrangement, with an expectation to be on site in Farnborough three days per week.

What you'll be doing:

• Owning the overall strategy, performance, and future direction of a large, complex service, ensuring it continues to meet customer, contractual, commercial and operational requirements.
• Leading and developing a diverse Service Management organisation including Service Managers, Service Desk leadership, practice specialists and technical teams.
• Driving the transformation and continual improvement of the service, identifying opportunities to improve performance, resilience, customer experience, automation and operational efficiency.
• Developing and communicating a clear service strategy and roadmap, ensuring teams, customers and senior stakeholders understand the direction of travel and their role within it.
• Providing leadership across new and transitioning services, working closely with technical, architecture, cyber, delivery and commercial teams to ensure services are designed and transitioned successfully into operation.
• Building strong relationships across the customer and Sopra Steria, managing challenging situations and competing priorities while contributing to the growth and development of our wider Service Management capability.

What you'll bring:

• Significant Service Management experience, with experience owning and leading large-scale, complex IT services within demanding customer environments.
• Strong people leadership experience, with a track record of managing large and diverse teams, developing leaders and successfully managing performance, and challenging situations.
• Understanding of end-to-end service delivery, including Service Desk, technical operations, infrastructure/platform teams, ITIL practices, service transition and continual service improvement.
• Strong strategic thinking and communication skills, with the ability to define a service vision and communicate strategy clearly with operational teams, customers, peers and senior leadership.
• A recognised Service Management qualification, ideally ITIL 4 Managing Professional or equivalent senior ITIL v3 experience, together with a strong understanding of modern Service Management practices.
• Experience working within secure or highly regulated environments, with a good understanding of cyber security and the ability to hold or obtain the required MoD DV security clearance.

If you are interested in this role but not sure if your skills and experience are exactly what we’re looking for, please do apply, we’d love to hear from you!

Employment Type: Permanent

Location: Farnborough

Security Clearance Level: MoD DV essential

Internal Recruiter: Josh

Salary: Competitive, based on experience

Benefits: Bonus, £6,600 car allowance, which can also be taken as cash. Benefits include 25 days’ holiday, with the option to purchase up to an additional 10 days per year, AXA medical insurance, 6% pension contribution and life assurance at 4x salary.

If you’re interested and need to work flexibly, we encourage you to apply and talk to us about what might be possible.

Loved reading about this job and want to know more about us? Sopra Steria’s Aerospace, Defence and Security business designs, develops and deploys digital solutions to Central Government clients. The work we do makes a real difference to the client’s goal of National Security, and we operate in a unique and privileged environment. We are given time for professional development activities, and we coach and mentor our colleagues, sharing knowledge and learning from each other. We foster a culture in which employees feel valued and supported and have pride in their work for the customer, delivering outstanding rates of customer satisfaction in the UK’s most complex safety- and security-critical markets.