Manchester Digital
Head of IT Service Management (IT Operations) - National Crime Agency - G6
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Head of IT Service Management – IT Operations
National Crime Agency (NCA)
Location
Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester, London, Normanton, Warrington
About The Role
Job Summary
Enterprise Services provides and manages the enterprise IT capabilities supporting NCA and its partners in delivering operational outcomes across the Serious and Organised Crime (SOC) system. Operating 24/7/365, the team ensures services are:
- Reliable
- Resilient
- Available when most critical
The role works in partnership with suppliers, focusing on:
- Cost-effective service delivery
- High-quality, transformative solutions
- Smooth introduction of new services
The Head of IT Service Management – IT Operations is a senior leadership position responsible for:
- Defining and delivering IT service management (ITSM) strategy
- Ensuring processes are governed, owned, and continuously improved
- Leading an operational team to deliver secure, high-performing IT services
- Acting as a trusted advisor and critical escalation point for senior stakeholders
- Aligning service performance, availability, and security with business goals
Job Description
What Makes This Role Exciting?
This is a pivotal opportunity to influence NCA’s technology evolution in a fast-paced, mission-critical digital environment. You will:
- Lead a team driving digital transformation, balancing legacy estate demands with cloud-native and modern platform adoption
- Maintain IT stability (24/7/365) while enabling continuous improvement and innovation
- Lead across key operational areas: service desk, incident/problem management, change control, service performance, and supplier oversight.
This role requires strong leadership, offering a chance to shape IT service management in a high-impact organisation—where change equates to progress without sacrificing reliability and customer focus.
Key Responsibilities
1. Leadership & Strategy
- Set and deliver a strategic ITSM direction aligned with business objectives.
- Champion ITIL-aligned best practices, ensuring continuous improvement in service management processes.
- Drive governance, optimisation, and service excellence to enhance user experience.
- Build a high-performing team with the right skills, culture, and capacity to deliver resilient, customer-focused IT servicess.
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2. Service Delivery & Operational Excellence
- Ensure 24/7 operational resilience of IT services, maintaining high availability, performance, and security.
- Act as the primary escalation point for critical IT incidents, leading decisive response efforts.
- Monitor and drive service performance, performance analytics and continuous improvement.
- Balance legacy technology needs with modern services and cloud-native adoption.
3. Change Management & Digital Transformation
- Drive increased digital adoption across the organisation.
- Implement agile ways of working while managing and retiring legacy systems.
- Allocate work effectively across internal teams and external suppliers to maximise efficiency and performance.
- Ensure smooth transition of new services into live operations without compromising stability or user experience.
4. Stakeholder & Supplier Management
- Represent ITSM at a senior level within the NCA, aligning service delivery to organisational goals.
- Build and maintain strong stakeholder relationships, acting as a trusted advisor on IT needs.
- Oversee supplier management, ensuring service quality, cost-efficiency, and adherence to contractual obligations within agreed budgets.
5. Team Development & Coaching
- Lead IT Operations teams, fostering a customer-centric, high-performing culture.
- Develop team capabilities and embrace modern service management techniques while maintaining operational excellence.
- Enable hybrid teams to balance legacy environments with agile, scalable innovation.
Person Specification
[Essential] Required Leadership Competences
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Scale & Strategic Direction
- Proven ability to set and deliver a strateg tic ITSM strategy aligned to business objectives.
- Leading high-performing teams using ITIL best practices.
- Championing continuous improvement in service methodology.
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Service Excellence
- Managing service availability, performance, and security within 24/7 operations.
- Balancing legacy and modern systems to drive high-end user satisfaction.
- Leading major incident resolution with decisive leadership.
-
Supplier & Stakeholder Alignment
- Building trusted relationships with senior stakeholders and multi-supplier ecosystems.
- Ensuring value for money across suppliers while tight cost-effective SLAs.
- Aligning service capabilities to business outcomes and priorities.
[Non-essential] Desirable Characteristics
- Experience with NetOps/AIOps transformation.
- Familiarity with shift-left approaches to incident management.
- Experience managing cross-limits or organisation budgets.
Essential Qualifications & Requirements
TL;DR – You must meet every criterion below:
✅ ITIL 4 Foundation certified
✅ CV evidence on how applicants have: - Managed IT Service Lifecycle (including incident, change, problem management and continuous improvement models). - Embedded ITIL best practices into teams and systems.
⚠ Additional Notes:
- At least one page of your CV must be dedicated to how you meet criteria.
- No additional pages will be reviewed.
- Suitability checks will apply if a pass threshold is met.
Benefits
While the job description did not include benefits, this is a high-impact senior role within a public-sector institution critical to national security. Conventional benefits include:
- Salary: £85,000 - £92,000 (with depending on location and experience).
- Prerogative disciplines may apply.
- Supportive working culture.
- Working for a key government agency.
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