IT Support Team Lead job description

IT support — IT Support Team Lead
Runs the desk day to day: queues, staffing and standards.

REQUIRED SKILLS
Service Desk
- Ticket Triage and Prioritisation — You can set the triage rules for the desk, review priority calls that assessors disagree on, and adjust queues when volume shifts.
- Service Restoration Coordination — You can lead a major incident bridge, hold the response to a structured process under pressure, and run the post-incident review.
- IT Problem Investigation and Trend Analysis — You can run problem investigations across the desk's ticket history, prioritise which problems get investigated first, and coach others through the method.
- Service Level Management — You can set SLA targets for new services being onboarded, and renegotiate a target that data shows is unrealistic.

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 audit the account lifecycle process for gaps, and fix the automation or handoff that keeps causing missed accounts.
- Onboarding and Offboarding Coordination — You can redesign the onboarding or offboarding process when it is missing steps or too slow, and measure whether the change worked.
- Access Reviews and Permission Audits — You can review access where permissions are nested and inherited and nobody agrees who owns the system, and produce evidence an auditor accepts. You are who people ask when a leaver still has access weeks later.
- 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 forecast licence and hardware needs ahead of renewals, and negotiate the numbers down using evidence of actual use.
- 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 run a supplier relationship day to day, covering renewals, licence counts and faults that cross into their equipment. You spot when the organisation is paying for something it stopped using.
- IT Operations Reporting and Metrics — You can turn messy operational data into reporting leaders act on, including the finding nobody wanted to see. You are who people ask when two reports disagree about the same month.
- 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 plan the staffing, tooling and spend for your own area a year ahead and keep to it. You see the demand coming from a business change before it arrives as a queue of tickets.

Delivery
- Project Management — You can run work spanning several teams, negotiate scope and sequencing with their owners, and maintain one shared plan that all of them actually use.
- Planning & Estimation — You can estimate work spanning several teams, name the assumptions each figure rests on, and re-cut the plan as those assumptions break.
- Ownership & Accountability — You can hold accountability for outcomes delivered mostly by other people, absorbing the blame when it fails and passing on the credit when it works.
- Quality Focus — You can design the quality practice for complex work owned by several teams, and you anticipate the failure modes that only appear once systems interact.

Craft
- Problem Solving — You can solve problems in domains where you are not the expert, and your solutions hold up on cost, performance, and maintainability at once.
- Domain Expertise — You can bring in practice from outside the organisation and make it work here, and your judgement demonstrably improves the projects you touch.
- Continuous Learning — You can judge which new ideas are worth the team's time and which are not, and you make room for the people around you to learn too.

Communication
- Communication — You can bring disagreeing groups to a shared understanding, and colleagues come to you for help framing a difficult or sensitive message.
- Collaboration — You can align teams with competing priorities on a common goal, surfacing the conflict early instead of letting it harden into resentment.
- Technical Writing — You can own the documentation of a large project, coordinating contributions so the work can be maintained by people who never built it.
- Stakeholder Management — You can hold senior and external relationships, negotiate between competing demands, and deliver unwelcome news without losing trust.

Leadership
- Leadership — You can lead across team boundaries, build the credibility that makes people follow you by choice, and create room for others to lead.
- Mentoring — You can develop other mentors, coach people through career decisions rather than tasks, and lift the capability of a whole team.
- Strategic Thinking — You can set direction for an area, choose deliberately what not to do, and defend that choice when it is challenged.

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)