Job Title
IT Senior Service Manager
Location
Asda House
Employment Type
Full time
Contract Type
Permanent
Hours per Week
37.5
Salary
Competitive Salary plus benefits
Category
IT Operations
Closing Date
18 September 2026
Purpose of the Role
The Senior Service Manager is accountable for Technology Service Management within an allocated Business Unit (BU), ensuring that technology services are performing, evolving and delivering value to the business, customers and colleagues.
The role acts as the senior interface between Technology and the Business, translating business priorities into service outcomes and leading a team responsible for the management of services, transition and operational run within the BU.
The Senior Service Manager combines strategic service leadership with hands-on operational credibility, ensuring services are stable, suppliers are performing, changes land safely, and improvements are continuously delivered.
Key Accountabilities
Business Unit Service Leadership
- Act as the senior Service Management leader for the Business Unit, owning the end-to-end service relationships alongside the BU leadership.
- Build and maintain trusted relationships with BU stakeholders, translating business priorities into clear service commitments.
- Own the BU service portfolio view — health, performance, risks, dependencies and roadmap.
- Represent the BU at Technology governance forums and represent Technology at BU leadership forums.
- Provide executive-friendly reporting on service performance, risks, incidents and improvements.
Service Performance & Customer Outcomes
- Own the overall performance of services within the BU — SLAs, availability, MTTR, CSAT, and incident/problem/change metrics.
- Chair Monthly Service Reviews and drive corrective action where required.
- Ensure services deliver measurable business value — customer experience, operational resilience, and colleague productivity.
- Escalate and lead the response to Major Incidents affecting the BU, providing executive communication and coordination.
- Own the incident, problem and change narrative for the BU — ensuring root causes are understood, remediated and communicated.
Service Transition & Lifecycle
- Ensure new and changed services are transitioned into live operations safely, on time and to standard.
- Own the BU transition pipeline, ensuring visibility of upcoming go-lives and operational readiness.
- Enforce Service Acceptance Criteria and Operational Readiness standards across the BU.
- Ensure services are operable, supportable and sustainable by the time they reach live running.
- Manage the warranty period post-go-live before formal handover to run.
Operational Run & Resilience
- Ensure services in live running are stable, resilient and continuously monitored.
- Ensure the BU is ready for peak trading, Bank Holidays and major events.
- Maintain strong linkage into the IT Command Centre and Major Incident function.
- Own the service risk register and drive mitigating actions.
Governance, Assurance & Continual Improvement
- Ensure the BU's services are compliant with ITSM practice standards set by Practice Owners.
- Provide assurance that processes are being followed and record quality is high.
- Own the continual improvement backlog, prioritising initiatives that drive customer, business and operational value.
- Contribute BU insight to enterprise-level practice, portfolio and governance forums.
Leadership & Team Development
- Lead, coach and develop a multi-disciplinary Service Management team within the BU.
- Set clear objectives, priorities and success measures for the team.
- Manage performance, capacity and wellbeing.
- Build a high-performing, collaborative and customer-obsessed team culture.
- Champion development, career growth and succession planning across the team.
Skills, Knowledge & Experience
Essential
- Extensive experience in senior Service Management leadership in a complex enterprise environment.
- Strong understanding of ITIL 4 practices and their application in a live enterprise context.
- Track record of influencing at senior executive and business leadership level.
- Strong experience managing service performance, incidents, problems and continual improvement.
- Excellent written and verbal communication — able to switch between technical detail and executive summary.
- Experience with ServiceNow or comparable ITSM tooling.
Everything you'll love
To ensure we balance moments where we know we need to collaborate together and the need for flexibility, Asda has a hybrid way of working with a minimum 3 days a week in one of our Home Offices. Over and above this, each area of Asda may have additional requirements which may require spending more days in the office, visiting suppliers, stores or depots.
You will also get an excellent benefits package including:
Discretionary company bonus
Company pension up 1.5 times colleagues' contribution (Max 15%)
Company Car allowance of £8000
15% colleague discount in store and online
Free access to wellbeing services such as Stream, 24/7 virtual GP, counselling, health and dental cash plans and a 24/7 employee assistance helpline, alongside discounts across a range of services and activities, from airport parking, enhanced to theme parks and cinemas.
Asda Allies Inclusion Networks – helping colleagues to make sure everybody is included and that our differences are recognised and celebrated
Excellent parental leave policies, including maternity & adoption leave, paternity leave, shared parental leave, neonatal care leave, and support for those doing fertility treatments.
We want all colleagues to be able to bring their best and true selves to work, every day. Simply put, we want our colleagues to be Proud to be Asda and proud to be themselves
