Service Transition Lead

In this role you lead the transition of new and changed services into live operation within a major technology transformation programme. You’ll bridge programme delivery and live service operations, ensuring operational readiness, support models, and clear ownership from day one. You collaborate with cross-functional teams across identity, endpoints, M365, applications, and infrastructure to implement controlled go-lives. Your work strengthens service design, governance, and knowledge transfer to enable smooth production handover. This is a hands-on role with a clear impact on how services are used in production and supported by the organisation.

• Autonomy to develop and grow
• Exciting project work making a societal difference
• Strong, inspiring leadership
• Flexible working arrangements
• 25 days annual leave + bank holidays
• Pension and private medical insurance

• Define the overall service-transition strategy and acceptance criteria for the programme
• Develop and maintain transition plans for pilots, migrations, cutovers, and handover to BAU
• Set entry/exit criteria and demonstrate operational readiness
• Coordinate service design and operational readiness across technical workstreams and service-management teams
• Collaborate with programme, project and technical leads to embed operational requirements in design and delivery
• Define and agree support models, escalation paths, SLAs and OLAs before production
• Ensure monitoring, backup, recovery, security, availability and resilience are designed and understood
• Establish and maintain service documentation, runbooks and knowledge articles
• Coordinate training and knowledge transfer for service desk, support, and operations
• Track transition risks and readiness actions through to completion
• Support go-live decisions with an assessment of readiness and risks
• Coordinate post-implementation reviews and capture lessons learned
• Use lessons learned to improve transition processes for subsequent waves

• Experience leading service transition or service management within complex technology programmes
• Knowledge of ITIL-aligned service management practices (design, transition, change, incident, problem, knowledge)
• Experience defining operational acceptance criteria and coordinating go-live readiness
• Ability to coordinate across multiple technical and business teams
• Experience with complex tech environments (cloud, Microsoft 365, identity, endpoints, hybrid infrastructure)
• Understanding of monitoring, backup, recovery, security, availability, resilience
• Experience developing or assuring SLAs, OLAs and service ownership
• Experience producing operational documentation and runbooks
• Experience planning early-life support, hypercare, warranty and formal handover
• Strong planning, coordination and stakeholder-management skills
• Excellent written and verbal communication across technical and non-technical audiences

• Facilitation and stakeholder management
• Delivery-focused mindset
• Attention to detail with big-picture thinking
• ITIL-aligned service management
• Operational readiness
• Service design and transition