Service Operations Manager

Your day at NTT DATA

The Manager, Managed Services Operations is a management role, responsible for operating within a Region/Country or Services function and is accountable for service delivery at the highest level thereby ensuring client satisfaction and the successful continuance of business operations within the organization.

This role ensures managed service is provided to all clients, thereby ensuring that their IT infrastructure and systems remain operational.

The primary objective of this role is to ensure contracted Managed Services outcomes are delivered to the client and assists with the planning, building and supporting of delivering managed services to meet business objectives.

Key responsibilities:

• Proactively monitors and drives service delivery to clients.
• Incident, Problem & Change Management
• Operational excellence in handling incidents (especially P1), root cause analysis, and change control is critical. This includes:
  • Leading 24x7x365 support for LAN, SDWAN, WLAN, and facilities
  • Managing escalations and ensuring SLA adherence
• Capacity Planning & Performance Optimization:
• Analyze tunnel utilization, forecast growth (e.g., ATM expansion), and recommend scaling strategies
• Monitor latency, packet loss, and utilization thresholds proactively
• Manages client incidents by investigating and providing solutions that help solve client problems as escalated by team leaders and engineers.
• Vendor and Carrier Management
• Works with client delivery teams to evaluate regional client reviews to ensure proactive incident management at client sites
• Ensures that the standard client information repository related to technology, operations manuals is current and accurate.
• Creates and maintains a comprehensive list of client requirements, the scope of deliverables, technology and the delivery model.
• Runs the managed services operations in alignment with the service management service operations (SMSO) process, delivering promised outcomes to clients.
• Provides operational support and continuous service improvement post client handover from Technical Services (or other) teams.
• Reviews training requirements for service operations teams.
• Engages with clients for technical operations as part of routine operations.
• Plans and implements key service improvement priorities based on a continual service improvement approach.
• Feeds continual service improvement priorities into the automation team.
• Ensures that tracking and monitoring of the performance of service delivery through all channels (human, digital, self-service, automated) is carried out, metrics and reports are analyzed, and issues are resolved.
• Responsible for the day to day running of the Managed Services Operations team in line with the performance established by the business.
• Ensures maximum uptime and the accurate and early response to client operational issues.
• Responsible for resource planning and work allocation to meet agreed service levels.
• Identifies opportunities for continuous service improvement.

To thrive in this role, you need to have:

• Excellent organizational and team management skills.
• Excellent communication skills – both verbal and written coupled with excellent ability to collaborate with internal stakeholders and external clients.
• Advanced understanding of budgets and cost management.
• Excellent time management, prioritization and delegation abilities.
• Excellent focus on client centricity.
• Highly focused on business outcomes.
• Ability to guide the team through transformational objectives set out by the business.
• Excellent ability to work across different cultures and social groups.
• Ability to work well in a pressurized environment and adapt to changing circumstances.

Academic qualifications and certifications:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent degree in Information Technology or Computing or related field (advantageous).
• ITIL certification is desirable.

Required experience:

• Advanced demonstrated experience in domain towers such as End-to-End SD-WAN Infrastructure Management:
• A strong grasp of SD-WAN architecture, including deployment, configuration, and monitoring, is essential. This includes:
  • Experience with tools like Cisco vManage, FortiManager, and NetFlow for centralized configuration and visibility
  • Managing tunnel capacity, link flapping, and device visibility issues, as seen in the SBSA SD-WAN operations
  • Cisco ISE, Network, Collaboration/Customer experience, Cloud, Security, Data Center.
• Strong Vendor Management skills
• Cross-Functional Collaboration & Reporting. This includes:
• Coordinating with architecture, delivery, and client teams to align on network strategy
• Producing dashboards, SOPs, and performance reports for executive and operational stakeholders
• Advanced experience in coaching and mentoring engineering team(s) gained within an information technology services organization.
• Advanced demonstrated experience implementing continual service improvement initiatives/plans (through automation, process enhancements).
• Advanced demonstrated experience in organizational change management (transformational experience).