IT Service and Operations Manager
| Posting date: | 27 May 2025 |
|---|---|
| Salary: | £59,900 per year |
| Hours: | Full time |
| Closing date: | 24 June 2025 |
| Location: | KT15 3LS |
| Company: | Government Recruitment Service |
| Job type: | Permanent |
| Job reference: | 396058/1 |
Summary
You may not have heard of the Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD), but have you ever:
- eaten meat, eggs, fish or honey
- drunk milk
- owned a pet or animal
- taken antibiotics
If you said yes to any of the above, you are directly affected by what the VMD does.
The VMD is the regulatory and policy lead responsible for issues concerning the authorisation, use, and manufacture of veterinary medicines in the UK.
Our aim is to protect public health, animal health, and the environment, and promote animal welfare by assuring the safety, quality and effectiveness of veterinary medicines.
Find out more at: About us - Veterinary Medicines Directorate - GOV.UK
The VMD Service and IT Operations Manager will be an experienced IT professional with a passion for supporting live Service and Operations across the IT landscape. You will be a highly motivated and organised individual with significant IT Service provision experience. With support from others, you will lead a team responsible for provisioning and maintaining services across the IT estate, including legacy systems, networks, supporting hardware, software, M365, the IT Service Desk and more.
The Service and IT Operations team is responsible for the live running and maintenance of the VMD services available to users. The team will also take on the service management relationship between VMD and a managed service provider for our public facing VMD digital services.
In addition, VMD has initiated a program to incrementally replace legacy systems and migrate workloads to cloud. The delivery pipeline for this will extend over the next two to three 3 years. The Service and IT Operations Manager will play a key role in ensuring that new services are safely and securely taken on, providing assurance to the Head of IT and leading the team through change. As this transition happens, the post holder will become increasingly focused on levels of service across the VMD IT Landscape. Reporting to the Head of IT, the Service and Operations Manager will work across the organisation to drive and embed a service management culture.
As the IT Service and Operations Manager, you will agree and monitor IT service levels across all relevant business functions, managing an operations team with a user-centric support approach, focused on service availability, security and performance.
You will also ensure that:
- All service and support functions remain responsive to user needs.
- The service catalogue and wider IT service operations knowledge library is well maintained.
- Reporting and service standards are met for their specific services.
- All technical change is communicated and managed, through appropriate governance.
- A culture of continual service improvement is embedded across the Service and IT Operations team.
Main duties:
- You will be responsible for the day-to-day running of the Services and IT Operations within VMD.
- You will ensure that VMD legacy services are operating as per design, that incidents and requests are prioritised and resolved with minimal impact on our users.
- You will be confident working across the organisation and closely with the IT delivery Programme, organising, managing, and reporting on the services within scope.
- You will drive up service standards, embedding a culture of service provision and continuous improvement within VMD IT Service and Operations.
- You will lead a team responsible for the analysis of incidents, defects for legacy systems, the delivery of solutions and fixes into Live Service as well as provisioning and supporting hardware and software for business users.
- You will work collaboratively with colleagues in development projects to safely transition new services into our formal responsibility, ensuring adequate knowledge transfer, monitoring and reporting.
- You will be responsible for providing detailed input to the development of annual budget forecasts so that cost of ownership of VMD services can be accurately reported and managed down.
- You will ensure that risks and issues of the team are captured and managed with effective mitigation strategies then escalated and made visible as appropriate.
- You will provide strong leadership as an advocate for user needs, security, service, performance and improvement.
- Contributing to relevant standards’ certification e.g. ISO27001.
- Complying with ISO 9001(quality management) and ISO 27001(information security) standards, and GDPR and record management requirements.
- Acting corporately - meeting, role-modelling, embedding, and championing the corporate objectives set by the VMD.
Proud member of the Disability Confident employer scheme