Operations Manager

Essential Duties & Responsibilities: 

1. Operating Model and Governance 

• Design, implement and maintain the cross-function operating model within the approved operating-model direction and decision rights, including the RACI, escalation paths, handover standards and interfaces between the NOC, outsourced SOC oversight, DC / Critical Facilities, integrated service desk and platform and partner teams.
• Line-manage the functional operations managers (NOC, SOC, DC / Critical Facilities), setting objectives and common operating standards while each retains ownership of their function.
• Preserve the independent security authority and escalation route of the SOC function, and the technical ownership of NOC tooling and facilities, within the common standards.
• Run the operational governance cadence, including daily and weekly operations reviews, major-incident and problem reviews, and corrective-action tracking to closure.
• Verify process compliance across the NOC, SOC and DC functions and drive corrective action for recurring gaps.
• Own the SLA and KPI framework, service-performance reporting and service-governance cadence.
• Arrange independent assurance of service performance through the approved governance route, outside the operations line, rather than self-assuring.
• Escalate material operational risks, decision-rights conflicts and underperformance to executive management through the approved governance route.
  

2. Operations Readiness and Shift Model 

• Produce and execute the operational-readiness plan covering process, tooling, people and documentation for approval by the designated approving authority.
• Integrate readiness across the NOC, outsourced SOC oversight, platform, integrated service desk and critical facilities; the NOC function owns NOC build and tooling, the SOC function owns outsourced SOC governance and the DC / Critical Facilities function owns facilities.
• Maintain readiness gaps, owners, target dates and acceptance evidence.
• Define the 24x7x365 shift-model framework, staffing establishment, rota standard, leave-planning rules and recruitment pipeline for approval, and approve each function's shift pattern against it; each functional manager proposes and operates their own pattern and roster within the framework.
  

3. ITSM and Service Coordination 

• Define and implement the cross-service ITSM processes for incident, service request, change, problem and knowledge management that all operational functions work against; functional managers configure tooling and runbooks to these processes.
• Command major incidents and coordinate cross-functional service restoration, holding the approved acknowledgement targets of 15 minutes for Critical, 30 minutes for Major and 60 minutes for Minor incidents.
• Manage progress notification during incidents, every 30 minutes for Critical, every 2 hours for Major and every 6 hours for Minor and deliver reason-for-outage and root-cause reports within the contractual window.
• Own the cross-service escalation model and resolver responsibilities and ensure operational records support service reporting and assurance.
• Act as duty manager within the 24x7x365 escalation roster for major incidents.

4. Service Performance and Workforce Control 

• Operate day-to-day service-performance monitoring against the SLA and KPI framework, including measurement method, reporting cadence and exclusions.
• Consolidate and validate the operational data supplied by the NOC, SOC and DC functions and issue the customer-facing service report.
• Set roster coverage, leave-planning and performance standards across the integrated service desk, NOC and SOC shift teams, monitored through the functional managers.
• Own the competency framework, onboarding and training standards and consolidated competency records for the operations establishment; functional managers deliver and validate function-specific competency.
• Drive corrective actions for recurring service or workforce gaps.
  

5. Operations Transition and Stabilisation 

• Maintain the integrated operations transition plan, runbook and SOP register, owners and acceptance dates across all operational functions.
• Verify that runbooks, SOPs and knowledge transfer produced by the functional managers are complete and signed off before service activation.
• Coordinate shadowing, reverse shadowing, training and competency validation for the operations establishment.
• Lead operations service transition and stabilisation, escalating unresolved gaps to executive management until exit criteria are met.
  

Education, Skills and Experience Requirements:

• Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology, Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering or a related discipline. 
• ITIL and relevant network, monitoring or infrastructure certification is strongly preferred and certification in service operations, cloud, monitoring or business is advantageous. 
• Minimum 8 years managing ICT, cloud or managed-services operations, including direct responsibility for a 24x7x365 shift team and line management of functional managers.
• Proven experience running 24x7x365 operations with ITSM, monitoring and AIOps tooling against contractual SLAs
• Experience designing and governing a cross-functional operating model, RACI, SLA / KPI framework and operational governance cadence.
• Strong ITSM, incident, problem, change and major-incident command capability.
• Experience in shift-model design, rostering and operational readiness for a newly launched service.
• Proven transition of partner-supported services into stable internal operations.
• Maintain operating-model, RACI, escalation, SLA / KPI framework, ITSM, major-incident, roster, competency, service-performance, readiness, runbook and transition records.