Find out exactly what skills, experience, and qualifications you will need to succeed in this role before applying below. Job Description: Our client is committed to building diverse, inclusive teams. We welcome applications from all backgrounds and particularly encourage interest from women, underrepresented groups, and neurodivergent candidates. We offer reasonable adjustments throughout the hiring process and are dedicated to creating a supportive, accessible environment for everyone. Operational Readiness Lead Location: Farnborough (onsite 5 days per week) Due to the nature of the work and the customers we support, the successful candidate must be eligible to meet UK Government and contractual personnel security requirements, including the applicable residency requirements for the role, and have the right to work in the United Kingdom. Some roles may also be subject to nationality requirements where these are necessary to meet UK Government or contractual security obligations. The IT Service Operational Readiness Lead is responsible for ensuring that new or changed IT services are fully prepared for operational support before deployment into live environments. This role acts as the bridge between project delivery teams, service management, operations, and support functions to ensure all operational, technical, and business readiness activities are completed, documented, and approved. The role supports successful service transitions by coordinating operational acceptance, support models, knowledge transfer, training, documentation, risk management, and service handover activities. Key Responsibilities Service Transition & Operational Readiness Lead Operational Readiness Reviews (ORR) for new and updated services.
Develop and maintain operational readiness frameworks, processes, and governance.
Ensure all operational acceptance criteria are met before service go-live.
Coordinate service transition activities across project and operational teams.
Act as the operational readiness authority for project deployments.
Service Acceptance & Governance Define and maintain Operational Acceptance Testing (OAT) requirements.
Facilitate readiness assessments and go-live reviews.
Identify and manage operational risks, issues, and dependencies.
Ensure service support requirements are documented and approved.
Knowledge & Documentation Management Ensure support documentation, work instructions, runbooks, and knowledge articles are created and maintained.
Coordinate knowledge transfer sessions between delivery and support teams.
Verify service desk and resolver groups have the information required to support the service.
Support Model & Resource Readiness Validate support structures, escalation paths, and service ownership.
Ensure monitoring, alerting, backup, recovery, and support tooling are operational.
Work with technical teams to confirm operational support capability and capacity.
Assess resource and training requirements for support teams.
Stakeholder Management Partner with project managers, service owners, architects, engineers, and support teams.
Provide readiness status reporting to senior leadership and governance boards.
Communicate risks, mitigation plans, and deployment readiness recommendations.
Continuous Improvement Identify opportunities to improve service transition and operational readiness processes.
Support ITIL best practices and organizational service management initiatives.
Analyse post-implementation reviews and lessons learned to improve future readiness activities.
Required Skills & Experience Strong understanding of ITIL principles and frameworks.
Previous experience in IT Service Management (ITSM) and Service Transition processes.
Experience managing operational readiness or service transition activities.
Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.
Experience working with infrastructure, cloud, application, and support teams.
Strong risk management and problem-solving capabilities.
Ability to coordinate multiple projects and priorities simultaneously.
We believe strong connections and community are key to our success. Our work model prioritizes in-person collaboration while offering flexibility to support wellbeing, productivity, individual work styles, and life circumstances. We're committed to fostering an inclusive environment where everyone can thrive. Recruitment fraud is a scheme in which fictitious job opportunities are offered to job seekers typically through online services, such as false websites, or through unsolicited emails claiming to be from the company. These emails may request recipients to provide personal information or to make payments as part of their illegitimate recruiting process. xrexnqw Our client does not make offers of employment via social media networks and our client never asks for any money or payments from applicants at any point in the recruitment process, nor ask a job seeker to purchase IT or other equipment on our behalf. More information on employment scams is available here .
