IT Operations Lead job description

IT support — IT Operations Lead
Owns IT operations, vendors and risk for the business.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Service Desk
- Ticket Triage and Prioritisation — You can redesign the triage model for a growing user base, balancing coverage against headcount, and defend the SLA it produces to the business.
- Service Restoration Coordination — You can set the incident response process for the organisation, decide what counts as major, and use the pattern across incidents to fund prevention.
- IT Problem Investigation and Trend Analysis — You can set how problem management works for the organisation, and use trend data to justify investment in the fixes that remove the most recurring pain.
- Service Level Management — You can own the service level agreements between IT and the business, and decide which targets earn their place against what they actually cost to hold.

Endpoint Support
- Endpoint Provisioning and Configuration — You can plan a hardware refresh or OS migration across the fleet, sequencing it to avoid disruption, and set the standard image policy.
- Remote Troubleshooting and Diagnostics — You can set the remote support tooling and standards for the desk, and step in on the faults nobody else can pin down.
- Mobile Device Management — You can design device management for a mixed fleet, including how work data is kept separate on personal phones, and move between platforms without stranding users. You are who people call when a policy breaks devices in the field.
- Patch and Update Management — You can get an estate full of legacy software and awkward exceptions to a patched state, and design the staged rollout that keeps it there. You are who people ask when an update breaks something in production.
- Print and Peripheral Support — You can diagnose a peripheral fault end to end, through drivers, print servers and stubborn docking stations, and get the user working without a rebuild. You notice when the same model keeps failing and deal with the cause.

Identity & Access
- Identity and Account Lifecycle Management — You can set the identity lifecycle policy for the organisation, including how fast an account must be disabled after departure, and answer for it in an audit.
- Onboarding and Offboarding Coordination — You can own onboarding and offboarding as a business risk, and defend how fast a leaver loses access when it is challenged in an audit.
- Access Reviews and Permission Audits — You can decide how often the organisation reviews access, who owns each system and what happens when a review is ignored. You get managers treating a review as their own job rather than an IT chore.
- Directory and Group Management — You can restructure a directory that has grown messy across sites or after a merger without breaking the systems that depend on it. You are who people call when a sync between the directory and another system falls apart.
- Password and Multi-Factor Authentication Support — You can work out why an account keeps locking or a factor keeps failing and fix the cause rather than only restoring access. You recognise a social engineering attempt in a reset request and stop it.

Infrastructure
- Network Fundamentals and Connectivity Support — You can plan connectivity for a new office or remote team, and set the standards for VPN and Wi-Fi that the rest of the desk works to.
- SaaS Application Administration — You can own the administration standard for the organisation's core SaaS platforms, and lead a migration or major configuration change.
- Cloud Storage and File Sharing Administration — You can set up storage for a team so the permissions still make sense a year later, and untangle a folder that has been shared far too widely. You migrate content between platforms without losing who had access to what.
- IT Asset and Licence Management — You can own the asset and licence strategy for the organisation, including disposal and data-wiping compliance, and answer for it financially.
- Backup and Data Recovery Support — You can design what is backed up, how often and how far back for systems with very different recovery needs, and prove the plan works by rehearsing it. You are who people call in the hour after data is found missing.

IT Operations
- Knowledge Base Authoring — You can set the knowledge base standard for the desk, including what must be documented before a change goes live, and audit it for gaps.
- IT Vendor and Contract Coordination — You can decide which suppliers the organisation depends on and what it will accept in a contract, and drop one that has stopped earning its place. You get budget holders bringing IT in before they sign rather than after.
- IT Operations Reporting and Metrics — You can decide what the organisation judges its IT function by, and retire the measures that only encourage gaming. You get other functions reporting on the same definitions instead of inventing their own.
- IT Shift Handover and Escalation Management — You can run handover across a team or several sites so nothing falls between shifts, and set the escalation thresholds others work to. You are who a junior rings at two in the morning when they cannot tell how serious it is.
- IT Operations Planning and Capacity — You can decide what the IT function is sized and funded to do, and win that case with the leaders who hold the budget. You get the business bringing its plans to IT early because you made the cost of surprise visible.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can run the organisation's largest and most contested programmes, and the planning practices you introduce get adopted by teams you do not lead.
- Planning & Estimation — You can forecast at the scale of quarters and headcount, and the estimation practice you set is what the wider organisation plans against.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can take on the outcomes the organisation is most exposed on, and other leaders route ownerless problems to you by default.
- Quality Focus — You can raise the quality bar across the organisation by building the tooling and habits that make the careful path the easy one.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can crack problems the organisation has repeatedly failed to solve, and your approach becomes how others tackle that whole class of problem.
- Domain Expertise — You can influence how the field is practised beyond this organisation, and your expertise settles questions that have stood open for years.
- Continuous Learning — You can set what the organisation invests its learning time in, and the material and practice you create outlive your involvement.

Communication
- Communication — You can set how the organisation communicates, and the forums and norms you create measurably improve how information travels through it.
- Collaboration — You can dismantle the barriers that stop teams working together, and how the organisation collaborates changes because of what you built.
- Technical Writing — You can set the writing standard the organisation works to, and documents you authored are still in use long after you moved on.
- Stakeholder Management — You can represent the organisation in its most consequential relationships and set how it engages with everyone who depends on it.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can set direction for the whole organisation, make hard calls under real uncertainty, and carry the decisions nobody else wants to own.
- Mentoring — You can shape how the organisation grows its people, and those you developed are themselves named by others as strong practitioners.
- Strategic Thinking — You can shape the organisation's strategy, and the bets you argued for are visible in where it ended up.

REQUIRED CERTIFICATIONS
- CompTIA A+ (required from IT Support Engineer)
- CompTIA Network+ (required from Senior IT Support Engineer)
- ITIL 4 Foundation (required from Senior IT Support Engineer)
- Microsoft 365 Certified: Endpoint Administrator Associate (required from IT Support Team Lead)