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Service Readiness Manager
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Job Title: Service Readiness Manager
Clearance: Active SC Clearance
Location: Remote
Duration: 31/03/2027
Rate: 671GBP/Day (Inside IR35)
Job Description
Role Purpose
The Service Readiness Manager is responsible for ensuring that new and changed services are fully prepared for deployment into live operation and support. Acting as the focal point between delivery teams, operational support teams, suppliers, and business stakeholders, the role provides governance and assurance that services meet agreed quality, security, supportability, and operational readiness requirements before go-live.
The role is accountable for coordinating release readiness, service transition activities, defect management, operational acceptance, and post-live stabilisation, ensuring services can be transitioned safely into Business as Usual (BAU) operation with minimal risk to service users and operational teams.
Key Responsibilities
Service Readiness & Operational Acceptance
- Define and maintain Service Readiness and Operational Acceptance criteria for programme releases.
- Assess readiness across people, process, technology, security, support, service management and operational processes.
- Coordinate Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT) activities.
- Ensure support teams have the capability, knowledge, documentation and tooling required to operate the service.
- Facilitate readiness reviews and provide recommendations to governance boards regarding deployment decisions.
Release Management
- Develop and maintain release schedules across multiple delivery teams and suppliers.
- Coordinate deployment planning and release governance activities.
- Manage dependencies, deployment risks and release conflicts.
- Ensure release approvals are obtained through agreed governance processes.
- Support deployment planning, go-live activities and rollback planning.
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Defect Management
- Establish and maintain defect management processes and governance.
- Chair defect triage meetings and manage prioritisation of defects.
- Provide visibility of defect trends, risks and remediation progress.
- Escalate critical defects impacting service readiness or live operation.
- Ensure agreed defect thresholds are met before production deployment.
Service Transition
- Coordinate transition activities between delivery and operational teams.
- Ensure transition plans are developed, maintained and executed.
- Verify service support models, processes and SLAs are in place.
- Ensure service documentation, runbooks and knowledge articles are complete and approved.
- Support supplier onboarding and transition activities.
Hypercare & Stabilisation
- Coordinate early life support and hypercare activities.
- Monitor service performance and defect resolution during stabilisation periods.
- Ensure ownership for outstanding issues is agreed before transition to BAU support.
- Produce lessons learned and improvement recommendations.
Risk & Governance
- Maintain readiness dashboards and reporting.
- Identify and manage service readiness risks and issues.
- Present readiness recommendations to Programme Boards, Design Authorities and Service Acceptance Boards.
- Support audit, compliance and assurance reviews.
Key Deliverables
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Service Readiness Assessments
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Operational Acceptance Reports
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Release Readiness Reviews
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Go-Live Recommendations
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Defect and Risk Dashboards
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Hypercare Plans
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Transition Plans
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Operational Support Models
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Service Acceptance Packs
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Lessons Learned Reports
Skills & Experience
Essential
- Experience delivering large-scale digital, data or technology programmes.
- Experience of Release Management, Service Transition and Operational Readiness.
- Strong knowledge of defect management and quality assurance practices.
- Experience working with multiple suppliers and delivery partners.
- Strong stakeholder management and governance experience.
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- Experience presenting recommendations to senior leadership.
- Understanding of Agile, Scrum and DevOps delivery approaches.
- Experience using service management tooling including ServiceNow and Jira
- Strong analytical, planning and risk management skills.
Desirable
- ITIL Foundation or higher.
- Experience in UK Government digital services.
- Experience working in highly regulated environments.
- Knowledge of Government Service Standard and service assessments.
- Experience supporting cloud-based services (AWS).
- Knowledge of cyber security and operational resilience requirements.
Central Government Specific Responsibilities
- Support compliance with the Government Digital Service (GDS) Service Standard.
- Ensure services are prepared for Alpha, Beta and Live service assessments where required.
- Work closely with Service Owners, Senior Responsible Owners (SROs), Delivery Managers and Programme Directors.
- Coordinate readiness across internal teams, arms-length bodies, third-party suppliers and managed service providers.
- Ensure accessibility, security, operational resilience and support requirements are understood and met before go-live.
- Support delivery of citizen-facing services by minimising operational risk during deployment and transition.
Typical Measures of Success
- Percentage of releases deployed successfully first time.
- Readiness assessments completed on schedule.
- Reduction in high-severity defects entering production.
- Successful completion of operational acceptance activities.
- Hypercare exit criteria achieved within agreed timelines.
- Reduction in deployment-related incidents.
- Stakeholder satisfaction with transition and go-live processes.
- Audit and assurance findings closed within agreed timescales.
If you are interested in this position and would like to learn more, please send through your CV and we will get in touch with you as soon as possible. Please note, candidates are often Shortlisted within 48 hours.
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