IT Service Manager - Newport

Job summary

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is the UK’s largest producer of official statistics, covering a range of key economic, social and demographic topics. These include measuring changes in the value of the UK economy, estimating the size, geographic distribution and characteristics of the population, and providing indicators of price inflation, employment, earnings, crime and migration.

Are you innovative with the energy and motivation to lead exciting technical and cultural change?

Would you thrive in an open, autonomous environment, championing IT Service Management principles and processes while embracing Agile ways of working to drive continuous improvement, collaboration, and value-focused outcomes. If so, this could be the role for you.

Our Digital Services (DS) Directorate develops and operates much of the technology and services that ONS uses to deliver. Demand for data and statistics are increasing, and DS has a critical role in enabling the business to meet these demands.

We are seeking an experienced IT Service Manager to join the Corporate IT & Services Division within the Digital Services (DS) Directorate.

Job description

As an IT Service Manager, you will manage a customer-focused service support team across multiple locations, ensuring the delivery of reliable, high-performing services while driving process maturity and continuous improvement.

We are seeking an enthusiastic and experienced IT Service Manager to join our Newport team. In this role, you will lead Change, Asset and Software Management, alongside Governance and Audit Compliance activities. You will ensure services are well governed, resilient, and aligned with organisational standards. This will involve overseeing service performance, managing risks and dependencies, safeguarding live services from disruption, and ensuring colleagues have the tools they need to work effectively.

You will ensure the team and services operate effectively, are well governed, and remain aligned with user needs and organisational objectives. This includes maintaining robust control frameworks, ensuring IT hardware and Software are delivering the best value for money and are purchased to meet business and user requirements.

We are looking for a team manager with excellent customer service and interpersonal skills, with a proven ability to deliver quality outputs in a fast-paced environment. You will be confident working under pressure, balancing competing priorities, and building effective relationships with both internal and external stakeholders.

You will have the skills to influence and challenge existing processes, using your communication skills to be able to handle challenging conversations.

Responsibilities

As an IT Service Manager, you will:

• Lead and manage a multi-skilled team of IT Service Analysts and Managers supporting IT service delivery.
• Lead effective queue management across multiple workstreams, ensuring work is prioritised effectively and delivered in line with business needs.
• Define processes across all workstreams to ensure audit compliance and governance activities are completed within tight deadlines.
• Deliver excellent customer service to internal and external customers.
• Work closely with IT Service Management colleagues, third-party suppliers, and internal business and technical stakeholders to build and maintain effective relationships.
• Lead teams to ensure service level agreements (SLAs) and operational level agreements (OLAs) are agreed, maintained, and understood across internal and external teams.
• Collaborate with wider IT service functions to maintain, improve, and mature services.
• Manage and mature team capabilities through continual development.
• Oversee day-to-day service delivery, balancing BAU and project demands while prioritising work to meet business and user needs

Person specification

Essential Criteria:

Skills and Experience – it is essential you:

• Have good technical understanding to support effective service delivery and informed decision making.
• Influence stakeholders, manage relationships effectively, and build long term strategic partnerships that support business outcomes.
• Take ownership of issues, proactively identify solutions, and deliver excellent user outcomes.
• See the bigger picture by taking groups of services, proactively identifying opportunities to improve underlying services and processes.
• Lead investigations, develop improvements to prioritise and deliver quality outcomes in a fast-paced environment.

Behaviours

We'll assess you against these behaviours during the selection process:

• Seeing the Big Picture
• Communicating and Influencing
• Changing and Improving
• Working Together

Benefits

Alongside your salary of £41,985, Office for National Statistics contributes £12,163 towards you being a member of the Civil Service Defined Benefit Pension scheme. Find out what benefits a Civil Service Pension provides (opens in a new window).

The Office for National Statistics is part of the Civil Service, and as such we share a number of key benefits with other departments, whilst also having our own unique offerings to support our valued colleagues across the organisation.

Whether you are hearing about us for the first time or already know a bit about our organisation, we hope that our careers site will give you a great insight into the benefits and facilities available to our colleagues, and our fantastic working culture.

Inclusion & Accessibility

At ONS we are always looking to attract the very best people from the widest possible talent pool, and we are proud to be an inclusive, equal opportunities employer. As a Disability Confident Leader we’re committed to ensuring that all candidates are treated fairly throughout the recruitment process.

As part of our application process, you will be prompted to provide details of any reasonable adjustments to our recruitment process that you need. If you would like to discuss any reasonable adjustments before applying, please contact the recruitment team in the first instance.

If you would like an accessible version of any of the attachments or recruitment documents below or linked to in this advert, please contact the recruitment team who will be happy to assist.

Things you need to know

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool to support your application, however, all examples and statements provided must be truthful, factually accurate and taken directly from your own experience. Where plagiarism has been identified (presenting the ideas and experiences of others, or generated by artificial intelligence, as your own) applications may be withdrawn and internal candidates may be subject to disciplinary action. Please see our candidate guidance (opens in a new window) for more information on appropriate and inappropriate use.

Selection process details

This vacancy is using Success Profiles (opens in a new window), and will assess your Behaviours and Experience.

Security Clearance

For ONS the requirement for SC clearance is to ha