Service Design & Introduction Summary

About the Role

Ensure new, changed, and continuously evolving services are designed, introduced, and assured to be operable, secure, resilient, supportable, and measurable from day one. This role enables safe transition across project, product, agile, and hybrid delivery models by ensuring service readiness, acceptance evidence, support models, supplier obligations, and customer outcomes are defined and validated before live operation.

Key Responsibilities

• Engage early with business, product, architecture, project, and technology teams to shape service requirements and translate business outcomes, technical designs, and customer needs into fit-for-purpose service models.
• Define and validate service non-functional requirements, including availability, capacity, performance, recoverability, security, monitoring, supportability, maintainability, and customer experience measures.
• Create, govern, and maintain Service Design artifacts covering people, process, technology, partners, data, tooling, service ownership, operational support models, and supplier integration.
• Define effective Operational Acceptance Criteria and ensure they are signed off, validated, and evidenced by appropriate stakeholders before go-live or material service change.
• Embed service design and operational readiness into agile, product-led, waterfall, and hybrid delivery models, enabling faster and safer change without compromising service stability.
• Ensure cloud, SaaS, infrastructure, workplace, application, and third-party services have clear ownership, support routes, escalation paths, operational processes, and measurable service outcomes.
• Work with Cyber Security, Risk, Architecture, and Service Operations teams to confirm that security, resilience, backup, disaster recovery, compliance, and regulatory readiness requirements are understood and evidenced.
• Ensure monitoring, alerting, observability, service dashboards, knowledge articles, and operational runbooks are in place to support proactive service assurance and effective incident response.
• Support automation and tooling improvements across ITSM workflows, service mapping, CMDB data quality, knowledge management, request fulfillment, and self-service enablement.
• Ensure services, assets, attributes, dependencies, and configurations are accurately recorded and maintained in the CMDB and associated service management tooling.
• Contribute to Go/No Go decisions by making clear recommendations and constructively challenging readiness where service acceptance evidence, operational risk, customer impact, or supplier preparedness is incomplete.
• Ensure hypercare, warranty, or Early Life Support arrangements are planned, owned, measured, and completed against agreed entry and exit criteria before transition into BAU.
• Support Continual Service Improvement by capturing lessons learned, service performance insight, operational feedback, and customer experience data from live service operation.
• Drive ongoing development of Service Design & Introduction processes, standards, and guardrails, including the Business Criticality Framework and service level definition approach.
• Improve measurable service outcomes by reducing operational risk at go-live, improving acceptance quality, strengthening CMDB and service data completeness, and enabling faster, safer transition into live operation.
• Collaborate with DTS, business stakeholders, and supplier partners to deliver resilient, customer-focused technology services and measurable service improvements.

Key Stakeholders

• Business Product Owners and Service Owners
• Project, programme, product, and change delivery teams
• Solution Architecture and Enterprise Architecture
• Service Transition and Service Operations
• Service Delivery Management and Service Assurance teams
• Incident, Problem, Change, Release, and Knowledge Management teams
• Cyber Security, Risk, Compliance, Resilience, and Data Protection teams
• Cloud, platform, application, workplace, and infrastructure engineering teams
• Supplier, vendor, SIAM, and commercial management teams
• Teams across the wider DTS and business functions
• Audit, Risk, Conduct, and Executive Reporting teams

Requirements & Tech Stack

• Strong understanding of modern IT Service Management and experience supporting complex, diverse, and business-critical technology services in a service-focused organization.
• Knowledge of ITIL 4, DevOps, agile delivery, and product-led operating models, and how Service Design & Introduction integrates with them.
• Experience defining service readiness for cloud, SaaS, hybrid infrastructure, digital workplace, application, and third-party managed services.
• Understanding of cyber security, operational resilience, disaster recovery, backup, monitoring, observability, and compliance requirements within service design.
• Ability to interpret architecture, technical, and delivery information and convert it into practical service models, operating procedures, and acceptance criteria.
• Experience working with ITSM platforms, CMDB/service mapping, workflow automation, knowledge management, self-service, and service reporting tools.
• Knowledge of managing performance across third parties, internal teams, and multi-supplier environments, including SLAs, OLAs, KPIs, XLAs, and service obligations.

Qualifications

• Required: Relevant professional experience and qualifications in IT service management, service design, service transition, technology delivery, or digital service assurance.
• Required: ITIL Foundation certification, ideally ITIL 4, or equivalent demonstrable service management experience.
• Desirable: ITIL 4 Specialist certification (e.g., Create, Deliver & Support) or equivalent service design/service transition certification.
• Desirable: Agile, DevOps, cloud, cyber resilience, service automation, or AI-enabled service management certification.
• Desirable: SIAM, supplier management, or service integration experience for multi-vendor environments.

Core Capabilities

• Collaboration and relationship building: Communicates clearly with technical, business, and supplier audiences, simplifying complex information and aligning stakeholders around shared service outcomes.
• Stakeholder engagement: Builds trusted relationships with internal and external stakeholders, listens to their needs, manages expectations, and influences decisions across delivery, operations, and governance forums.
• Prioritization and decision making: Guides effective decisions by balancing customer experience, operational readiness, resilience, risk, delivery pace, and technical complexity.
• Customer and colleague focus: Uses service insight, experience measures, and operational data to design services that are reliable, accessible, and effective for customers and colleagues.
• Risk, resilience, and safety awareness: Identifies risks associated with the role and takes appropriate steps to mitigate them, including cyber, service continuity, operational resilience, and compliance considerations.
• Constructive challenge: Challenges decisions, activities, or delivery approaches where they may not lead to the right customer, service, security, or business outcome.
• Adaptability and continuous improvement: Asks insightful questions, navigates ambiguity, and uses feedback, service data, and lessons learned to improve service design and introduction practices.

Tailored Capabilities

• Advanced understanding of IT Service Management and ITIL 4, including how service design, transition, operations, governance, and continual improvement operate across the service lifecycle.
• Ability to align technology services with business objectives, including service strategy, service ownership, operational readiness, experience level outcomes, and measurable service performance.
• Broad technical understanding across technology domains such as networks, end-user compute, infrastructure, cloud, SaaS, platforms, operating systems, databases, integrations, and enterprise applications.
• Strong understanding of ITSM, DevOps, agile, and product-led delivery practices and how they support faster, safer, and more customer-centered service change.
• Capability to define service assurance requirements, including monitoring, alerting, dashboards, service health indicators, runbooks, knowledge articles, and operational reporting.
• Analytical capability to interpret service, operational, customer experience, and delivery data, identify trends, and recommend improvements.
• Strong business relationship management skills, including the ability to understand stakeholder needs and communicate effectively across business, technology, operational, and supplier teams.
• Vendor, supplier, and service integration capability, including the ability to manage service expectations, validate supplier readiness, and support high-quality outcomes through third-party and multi-supplier delivery models.
• Understanding of service automation, AI-enabled service management, ITSM tooling, CMDB data quality, service mapping, and digital workflow enablement.