Head of Service Operations

Head of Service Operations

We’re looking for a skilled and experienced Head of Service Operations who is passionate about what they can bring to develop and deliver better services for the Taxes, Benefits and EOPS platform.

You’ll have management or leadership experience and be confident engaging with senior stakeholders outside the design professions, to ensure outputs meet both user needs and business goals.

The role holder will inspire, advise, and support an appropriately knowledgeable and skilled Platform Engineering and Operations set of teams, ensuring that they are fulfilling their deliverables on time and to a high level of quality, whilst maintaining the safety and security of BAU services. Most importantly, they also provide the technical oversight and strategy to ensure we are using the right technologies, in the right way to build and maintain Enterprise Tax management Platform (ETMP) to support our Product teams and help increase speed to market.

The role is expected to ‘think big’ on Technology and service provision, drive us to innovate within Platforms, and retaining the ability to dive deep and support Live Services.

It will be expected to unify the platform services between our Cloud and Integration platform and support further alignment and Migration to SovCloud and SAP S4/HANA.

This Executive Level Engineering role, working to the Chief Engineering and Platform Officer has accountability for the operational and Leadership authority to optimise delivery of strategic change within Platforms to support CDIO delivery teams delivering change.

Key Responsibilities

• Work with the Senior Leadership Teams of the relevant Directors, provide leadership and direction to drive the alignment of business delivery into platform services
• Gain an understanding of the relevant operational and policy strategies and technologies to ensure we can build platform services that enable increased speed to market, whilst ensuring they are reliable and secure.
• Understand and influence Platform Strategies, promote improved processes and continuous improvement.
• Validate that ETMP Platform and Product Strategies remains aligned to the appropriate operational and policy strategies.
• Engage with other IT Leaders and the wider government community to develop a cross-government perspective for their domain areas, where appropriate and ensure HMRC interests are represented and opportunities for HMRC are exploited.
• Overall safeguard the Operational Platform that is identified as Critical National Infrastructure

Essential Criteria

• Expert in managing Live Services and Operations. This means extensive knowledge for, demonstrating a breadth of technical knowledge, ideally serving customers at scale.
• Lead and direct teams to make sure that service level agreements (SLAs) and operational level agreements (OLAs) are in place with both external and internal teams
• Accountable for ensuring all Run suppliers carry out processes and activity fully according to contractually and Service obligation including security measures, audit requirements, BCPs and DR exercises
• Accountable for Platform performance and services, including patching strategy.
• Has a broad knowledge and understanding of IT concepts and architectures, coupled with practical knowledge of problem management and the principles and processes of implementing and delivering IT services
• An extensive understanding of relevant financial principles and procedures including cross charging both internal and external to the organisation
• Has the ability to lead teams of staff successfully, when handling complex or high impact problems
• Has substantial experience of dealing with users, specialists and service providers and are skilled in conducting meetings and team management
• Provide assistance to the products and business unit during the delivery of scoping assessments, resource estimation, project costing, proposal and statement of work generation, and customer and partner project team evaluation
• Provide management support to projects relating to service initiatives, product and technology releases, methodology rollouts, and cross-product solution deliveries
• Demonstrate an active interest in identifying further opportunities to add value through the delivery of SAP services, through interaction with clients
• Driving governance structures and control frameworks for ongoing data and information management