Ian has been engaged as an ITIL Service Delivery Manager by both IBM (UK) on a UK Government contract managing services to over 9,000 users and by NAET (Europe) in a variety of stakeholder-facing positions. These roles required him to establish and manage business expectations and also to inspire diverse IT teams to meet and exceed those expectations. Prior experience as a senior Team Lead with additional managerial training and exceptional soft skills only serves to reinforce his abilities.

Amongst the many varied activities Ian carried out as a Service Delivery Manager, specific actions included (but were not limited to);

• Translating customer requirements into working instructions and creating Process documentation.
• Mitigating and solving escalations with urgency and determination;
• Providing Root Cause Analysis
• Providing detailed reports as per an agreed schedule and ad-hoc.
• Building and maintaining customer relationships.
• Ensuring that quality services were delivered with regard to agreed SLAs.
• Maintaining the Service Desk role as the co-ordination point for all IT related issues.
• End-to-end management of all calls reported to the IT Service Desk.
• Escalating service interruptions and/or ongoing faults.
• Managing 3rd parties and 3rd party delivered services.
• Maintaining a continuous improvement program.
• Maintaining up-to-date documentation of standard technical procedures
• Ensuring compliance to the standard technical procedures.
• Being proactive and taking the initiative to continually develop local knowledge, technical expertise and professional skills and ensuring this was shared throughout the teams.

Ian believes that IT Service Managers should "get their hands dirty" and considers the role to be about;

• Facing the customer, building and maintaining excellent working relationships whilst managing expectations against stated business goals.
• Maintaining high-performing service support functions.
• Owning the Incident, Request, Change and Escalation processes.
• Ensuring high performance levels in these processes, coupled with accurate reporting and continuous service improvement.
• Taking ownership of major incidents, ensuring co-ordination of resolving parties, effective communication to stakeholders and post incident analysis.
• Monitoring, controlling and supporting service delivery; ensuring systems, methodologies and procedures are in place and followed.
• Being a Service and Support "champion".
• Being accountable for the quality of Service and performance.
• Driving internal and 3rd party service review meetings looking at performance, service
  improvements, quality and processes.
• Effectively leading the Desktop Management team.
• Managing the desktop environment to ensure that connected devices are built and maintained to the highest standards of performance and security.
• Ensuring that patching, anti-virus and anti-malware updates are carried out promptly and effectively.
• Being self-motivated and highly organised.
• Being flexible.

An IT Service Delivery Manager should also be able to effectively deliver Staff Management including recruitment, mentoring, training, target setting and performance evaluation. They should also be an ambassador for IT, working across the business, providing effective communication on IT matters whilst building lasting relationships with other teams to ensure effective dialogue between departments.

Often Service Delivery Managers can be drawn too far into technical aspects of IT Service provision and lose sight of many of the more core elements that the role requires. In those cases the post-holder becomes merely an elevated member of the regular IT support function, leaving a gap that requires filling - by a Service Delivery Manager!