Senior Consultant - Service Transistiion & Delivery

Role: Senior Consultant – Service Transition & Delivery

Location: London/Hybrid

Clearances: Internal Background Check (DBS) / Eligible for Security Clearance  

About us

Solirius Reply, part of the Reply Group, is a technology consultancy and digital transformation partner that helps organisations solve complex challenges through strategy, design, engineering, and delivery.

We work closely with our clients to deliver secure, accessible, user-focused services that evolve with their needs. By combining deep technical expertise with people-centred design, we create solutions that deliver meaningful, lasting impact.

Our consultants partner directly with client teams, embedding into organisations to understand their goals, challenges, and users. This collaborative approach enables us to deliver tailored solutions that drive measurable outcomes across public and private sectors.

Past and present clients include the Ministry of Justice, Department for Education, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, UEFA, International Olympic Committee, and Mercedes-Benz. Our services span the full digital delivery lifecycle, including architecture, engineering, delivery management, user-centred design, business analysis, data, DevOps, and AI.

We operate as a collaborative and inclusive organisation that empowers our people to take ownership, innovate, and develop their expertise. As an equal opportunities employer, we are committed to encouraging equality, diversity, and social mobility, while creating opportunities for our teams to work on meaningful projects that deliver lasting impact

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Role Purpose

Located within the Solirius Reply Service Centre, this multi-skilled disciplinary role, champions service management best practices across the organisation.

When deployed on assignment, the Senior Consultant guides our clients (predominantly public sector) through the critical phase between programme / project delivery and operational stability.

Operating across diverse digital landscapes (cloud platforms, multi-supplier environments and legacy estates), this role ensures technology services successfully transition, pass service assessments (GDS and AiS levels) and migrate into live running without disrupting citizen-facing services or client internal operations.

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Key Responsibilities

1. Transition Strategy & Governance

• Lead the definition and execution of end-to-end Service Transition strategies.
• Establish, chair and govern formal Operational Readiness Reviews (ORRs), Gate assessments and Service Acceptance Criteria (SAC).
• Embed key needs into operational readiness gates (e.g. accessibility, security compliance and data privacy safeguards) liaising directly with the relevant client functions.
• Manage early-life support (ELS) / hypercare windows for critical services, ensuring structured exit gates into steady state.

2. Multi-party Orchestration

• Undertake Service Designs, operational level agreements (OLAs) and underpinning contracts (UCs) to help manage supplier relationships and provide transparent accountability across multi-tier support (Levels 1–4).
• Navigate and align multi-supplier delivery teams (e.g. combining major systems integrators, niche SME suppliers, in-house digital teams).
• Lead service design workshops to ensure interoperability between client service desks, third-party managed service providers (MSPs) and shared services platforms.

3. Operational Readiness

• Assess and translate diverse architectures into practical and pragmatic support arrangements.
• Ensure operational metrics are embedded, verifying that event monitoring, logging, audit trails and alerting meet required baselines (e.g. Security Principles).
• Coordinate business operational readiness, verifying that service end-users and operational teams receive sufficient operational training, run guides and playbooks.

4. Consulting Delivery and Business Development

• Act as a trusted subject matter expert to client’s senior leadership, clearly translating complex operational risk into policy and business impact.
• Support proposal development, bid writing and statements of work (SOWs) for procurement frameworks (e.g. Digital Outcomes and Specialists / DOS, G-Cloud).
• Coach junior consultants, and contribute to the consultancy’s Service Transition and Delivery methodology.

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Candidate Specification & Requirements

Essential Skills

• General Experience
• 5+ years within IT Service Transition (or Delivery with a strong service management exposure)
• at least 2–3 years in client-facing consulting or large-scale public sector digital transformation programmes
• Supplier Governance: proven ability to manage multi-supplier dependencies and enforce operational acceptance criteria across external contractors and internal delivery teams.
• Public Sector Experience
• Demonstrable track record delivering within UK Central Government, Local Authorities, NHS/Health, Defence, or Policing contexts.  
• Experience and grasp of public sector governance.
• Consulting Competence
• Commercial awareness, structured problem solving, senior stakeholder management, workshop facilitation and 
• the ability to operate effectively within ambiguous client environments.
• Technical Breadth
• Broad conceptual literacy across enterprise architectures: cloud platforms (AWS, Azure), integration layers (APIs, ESBs) 
• IT Service Management tooling experience
• for example Jira SM, ServiceNow, Halo

Desirable Certifications

• ITSM certifications e.g. ITIL 4 Foundation level Certification
• Project Management certifications e.g. AgilePM, Prince2 or ScrumMaster certification