Service Delivery Manager

The Economist Technology team provides specialist services to deliver the technology which brings The Economist to life for millions of readers, and provides our business with the tools we need to succeed. The appointee will join the team as our new business and growth strategy unfolds, and the need for technology excellence and digital customer experience becomes paramount in our ability to deliver this.  This is  the  time to  be  joining a  profitable, responsible business with a brand and culture that you can  be proud of and with every opportunity to deliver success for the Group and yourself.

The Economist Group has recently moved to a matrix structure with one Group CIO as functional lead working collaboratively with the Managing Directors/Presidents of its four business units as well as the wider group leadership team. The CIO and other functional leaders are responsible for functional excellence, careers paths, incentive structures as well as consistency in tone, platforms and tools.

The role of Service Delivery Manager is part of our Service Management team. It will be key to extending and increasing our service management capability, and to enabling us to deliver on our objectives. We seek to ensure all of our end to end technology services meet agreed quality criteria in terms of their performance, availability, quality, and security. We actively seek opportunities to improve our technology and the practices we adopt in managing it. 

This role would be suited for an experienced, ambitious Service Delivery Manager looking to take ownership of the end to end service management for a group of high profile B2B products currently undergoing exciting changes. 

Service Delivery Managers should expect to be available during non-standard working hours. 

How you will contribute:

• Contribute to the delivery of the overall technology service strategy
• Implement service management strategy
• Build the value and visibility of service management within your service area and become a trusted partner
• Work with other Service Delivery Managers to build a mature community of practice which will deliver value to the Economist
• Ensure high quality, appropriately available support is in place and support services are continually reviewed to identify opportunities for improvement
• Be accountable for the overall incident response of production incidents and problem resolution in your service area
• Be part of a service management wide 'follow the sun'  major incident response team, with particular responsibility for incident communications and managing information to stakeholders during a M.I.
• Ensure service stakeholders always have access to relevant service information and proactively informed about critical issues
• Ensure services are appropriately monitored so that the established KPIs can be tracked
• Collaborate with colleagues to promote excellence in information security and the compliance of production environments
• Manage service and support reviews with 3rd parties as required
• Advise colleagues on best practice change, and ensure change is delivered safely, in line with shared operational standards. 
• Ensure major change is sufficiently risk managed, peer reviewed, authorised and documented in an agreed service area
• Ensure significant new services are transitioned to production in accordance with an appropriate service design
• Use data to identify opportunities for CSI
• Collaborate with colleagues to prioritise opportunities which deliver the greatest value in terms of supporting our business and delivering our technology objectives
• Ensure maximum learning comes from all major production incidents and that followup is applied.
• Run health checks on day to day service operations to ensure our best practice is in place and is delivering the service quality expected

The ideal skills for this role are:

• Experience of the Digital Media or Publishing sectors would be an advantage
• Experience of managing service with 3rd party suppliers
• Experience with agile and waterfall delivery modes 

• Clear understanding of the technology product life-cycle 
• Demonstrably excellent influencing skills
• Be highly commercially astute with a laser focus on customer experience
• A proactive individual who will take responsibility to act and think laterally to rapidly solve problems and recommend improvements.
• Strong customer focus, excellent problem solving and analytical skills.  
• Strong verbal and written communication skills.
• Good at teamwork
• ITIL Foundation certificate or higher, preferably ITIL4