IT Service Operations Manager

The British flower market is worth £1.2bn and MM Flowers supplies fresh cut flowers and bouquets to the U.K.’s and Europe’s leading flower retailers. We grow and source the highest quality and most beautiful blooms across the world, delivering colour, passion, and inspiration through breath-taking bouquets.

Established in 2007, MM Flowers has grown exponentially every year and is based in a purpose built, state-of-the-art facility in Alconbury, Huntingdon. MM Flowers employs over 900 people who are dedicated to delivering exceptional quality and service to our customers.

MM Flowers’ values and behaviours form the basis of our culture and are a guide to the way we work as individuals, in teams and with our customers, They can be used as a guide and a reference to support processes such as team development, performance management, recruitment, identification of talent, and on-going coaching to support the delivery of our ambitious growth plans.

Creating Meaningful Moments that do good for people, and our planet.

We are currently looking for an IT Service Operations Manager

The IT Service Operations Manager is a key role for MM Flowers during an exciting time of change, transformation, and enablement of our business strategy through the better use of technology. The role will be a key enabler to drive operational excellence and ensure all services meet business requirements and are well supported to agreed Service Level Agreements. The role will be responsible for ensuring quality and availability of all services, and that they are supported to the agreed service levels and MM Flowers has IT support in place to meet current and future business requirements.

Working closely with all members of the IT Team and as an escalation point for business colleagues, the IT Service Operations Manager will ensure all services meet business requirements and that service operations deliver a brilliant level of support closely aligned to ITIL processes and controls.

This is a hands-on role that will be required to be the technical escalation point capable of resolving service issues within agreed SLAs to ensure the smooth operation of the MM Flowers business.

The primary objectives of the role

• ITIL Processes and Controls: A drive to implement and ensure adherence to ITIL processes and controls and the mindset to encourage, coach and develop others to deliver operational excellence.
• Operational Excellence: Management of all Business Systems and IT infrastructure services post service transition to production
• Service Transition: Facilitation of all IT systems and service transition to production – Ensuring support calls are handled after service go live.
• Service Desk: Building and leading an effective IT Service Desk to support the business in alignment with the requirements of a 24/7/365 manufacturing business with the appropriate out of hours and on-call rota. This role will be part of the on-call structure.
• Monitoring and Alerting: Working with colleagues ensuring all services including network monitoring and alerting, firewalls, anti-virus, intrusion detection systems and disaster recovery services are running as designed and built. Measurement by reduction in outages through pre-emptive measures to minimise interruptions.
• Vendor Management: Maintaining good working relationships with IT suppliers, 3rd party service and hosted solutions, support companies and maintaining their relevant contracts. Ensure performance according to agreed Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with diarised BAU and strategical documented reviews.
• Escalation point: Escalations picked up within defined and agreed SLA’s. Ensure adherence and response times to reply to escalations are met.
• To provide a fit for purpose team to deliver:
• Incident Management: Recording of all incidents and the SLA conformance.
• Major Incident Management: Responsible for taking the lead in Major Incident Management.
• Problem Management: Responsible for implementing problem management procedures to drive the reduction of repeating incidents.
• Root Cause Analysis: The reduction of incident trends through Root Cause Analysis for all major incidents.
• Patch Management Analysis: Working with IT Infrastructure and Security ensure patch management is reported. Measured via number of endpoints unpatched.
• Service Management: Measured via customer satisfaction surveys.
• Change Management: Measured via compliance conformance that all changes go through the agreed process.
• Implementation and continuous development of the department ITIL based Framework: Measured by external ITIL Maturity Level Audit
• Automation: Drive automation of processes in a consistent way throughout the IT function leading to a reduction of time dedicated to repeatable tasks.
• Service Reviews: Improve and enhance service quality through close engagement with the business and suppliers. Measured by the service review process.
• System Training: Provide the mechanism for systems training in conjunction with the MM Flowers training team. Measured by the number of training sessions and the trending of ticket reduction.
• Mentoring and Development: Reviewing and developing staff to ensure development plans are in place and appropriate training is agreed in staff PDPs on an annual basis.

What you can already do

• ITIL Certification
• Six Sigma
• Expert level understanding and knowledge of IT service management (ITSM) and Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL).
• Managing 3rd party vendors service desk vendors to meet contractual commitments against SLAs and KPIs.
• An expert in the implementation and management against ITIL processes and controls with the ability to encourage, coach and develop others to deliver operational excellence.
• A drive to always improve, automate service delivery, and improve service design and delivery.
• Experience supporting the following specific technologies: Active Directory, Office 365, public cloud.
• Experience supporting IT networking: TCP/IP, DNS, routing, subnetting. And network infrastructure including Aruba Central, Checkpoint firewall, Cisco Meraki, VPN point-to-point experience.
• Experience supporting Servers, Storage and Compute: HP Servers, VMWare ESXi, Windows Server, SAN, UNIX & Linux operating systems.
• Experience supporting business systems: ERPs / Operational Technologies / EDI / Business Intelligence (PowerBI / Microstrategy)
• Comfortable working in technical and non-technical environments and be able to traverse these with ease.
• Excellent communication and inter-personal skills that enable you to understand, distil and convey technology opportunities to technical and non-technical individuals and audiences communicate effectively to the right level, at the right time, for your target audience.
• Experience in Manufacturing / FMCG.
• Providing exceptional service levels when supporting technology within a fast-paced, medium sized organisations.
• Working in a controlled environment with experience, knowledge, and desire to continuously improve.
• Deliver solutions within the appropriate framework and methodology whilst ensuring the supportability of services delivered.
• Experience of ITIL framework

MM Flowers are a proud equal opportunity employer, and we understand the benefits of nurturing a diverse and inclusive workplace. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, colour, sex, religion, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, disability, genetic information. Applicants who require a reasonable accommodation to complete the job role advertised are encouraged to apply.

We believe we can only achieve our potential if we employ a diverse population of people, ideas, and perspectives. We are committed to grow our workplace culture, encouraging team members to feel unique valued and engaged, enabling them to achieve their full potential.

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