Focus Group
IT Service Transition Lead (Contract)

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IT Service Transition Lead (Contract)
Immediate start | 3-month contract | Up to £600 per day
UK Based - Midlands Preferable
Focus Group is a £300m-revenue, 1,400-person technology services company backed by Hg Capital. Following our $1bn valuation in 2024, we're scaling rapidly and investing in AI to transform how we operate and how we serve our 30,000 SME customers. As we continue to expand our portfolio and scale our operations, we're committed to setting new industry standards in managed service excellence, and our growth trajectory and strategic acquisitions position us as an organisation ready to redefine what world-class technical support means in today's rapidly evolving technology landscape.
The opportunity
We're looking for an experienced IT Service Transition specialist to join us immediately on a 3-month contract, supporting a large-scale, multi-site hospitality customer with network deployment spanning Wi-Fi remediation, SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network), and hosting workstreams. This is an inflight, high-profile programme, so you'll need to get up to speed quickly and pick up existing workstreams with minimal ramp-up time.
You'll own the transition of services from delivery/project phase into live operational support, ensuring a smooth handover with minimal disruption to a high-complexity, high-profile client.
What you'll be doing
- Leading end-to-end service transition planning and execution
- Coordinating handover between project delivery, engineering, and service delivery teams
- Managing transition documentation, RAID logs, and go-live readiness criteria
- Acting as a key point of contact for client stakeholders throughout transition
- Identifying and mitigating transition risks across a multi-site network
- Providing transition governance, reporting, and executive-level updates to programme boards, service leadership, and customer stakeholders
- Confirming the target operating model is ready before go-live, including support ownership, resolver groups, SLAs (Service Level Agreements), OLAs (Operational Level Agreements), and escalation paths
- Planning and coordinating knowledge transfer sessions for service desk, NOC (Network Operations Centre), engineering, and service management teams
- Owning service readiness assessments across people, process, tooling, monitoring, documentation, support model, knowledge management, and supplier dependencies
- Driving operational acceptance and formal service acceptance into business-as-usual (BAU) support
- Planning and managing Early Life Support (ELS) and hypercare periods, ensuring a smooth transition into steady-state operations
- Ensuring transition activity is aligned to change, release, and CAB (Change Advisory Board) governance, including go-live approvals, implementation, rollback, and communication plans
- Ensuring operational tooling, monitoring, alerting, asset data, CMDB (Configuration Management Database) records, and service dependencies are fully validated ahead of service acceptance
Reasons to use Rodeo
I’m in my final year doing Economics and I don’t know whether to apply for grad schemes now or do a masters first. What do you think?
Honest answer — it depends on where you want to end up. A lot of top grad schemes (Big 4, civil service, banking) don’t need a masters. Let’s look at the ones you’d be competitive for now, and we can decide if a masters actually adds anything.
Also worth knowing: most autumn 2026 applications are open now. Timing matters more than you think.
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Graduate Consultant — 2026 Scheme
Why you're a good match
StrongYour economics background and your summer at a regional bank line up with what PwC looks for on the consulting scheme. Applications close in four weeks.
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Why you're a good match
You’ve got the grades and the economics background, and your bank internship is exactly the experience this scheme looks for. Apply soon — deadlines close within the month.
Experience fit
Your summer at the bank plus your econometrics coursework map directly to the day-one responsibilities on this scheme — client modelling, market briefings, and deal support.
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No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
What we're looking for


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- A proven Service Transition background within an MSP (Managed Service Provider) environment
- Strong process, transition, and governance discipline
- Solid working knowledge of cloud and networking technologies, including Microsoft, Meraki, and Fortinet
- Experience delivering into enterprise or mid-market accounts
- Strong understanding of ITIL Service Transition, Service Validation & Testing, Knowledge Management, Change Enablement, and Service Acceptance
- Comfortable managing complex, multi-stakeholder transitions under time pressure, with the ability to hit the ground running on live projects
- Experience managing transitions involving multiple suppliers and customer stakeholders
- Experience working with ServiceNow, CMDB management, and operational monitoring platforms
Desirable:
- Hospitality or multi-site retail sector experience
- ITIL or formal service transition qualifications
- Exposure to SD-WAN and network security transition
The details
This is a 3-month contract with an immediate start, paying up to £600 per day (dependent on experience). If you're ready to make an impact from day one on a high-visibility programme, we'd love to hear from you.
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