IT Service Transition Lead

The opportunity

We're looking for an experienced IT Service Transition specialist to join us immediately on a 3-month contract, supporting a large-scale, multi-site hospitality customer with network deployment spanning Wi-Fi remediation, SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network), and hosting workstreams. This is an inflight, high-profile programme, so you'll need to get up to speed quickly and pick up existing workstreams with minimal ramp-up time.

You'll own the transition of services from delivery/project phase into live operational support, ensuring a smooth handover with minimal disruption to a high-complexity, high-profile client.

What you'll be doing

• Leading end-to-end service transition planning and execution
• Coordinating handover between project delivery, engineering, and service delivery teams
• Managing transition documentation, RAID logs, and go-live readiness criteria
• Acting as a key point of contact for client stakeholders throughout transition
• Identifying and mitigating transition risks across a multi-site network
• Providing transition governance, reporting, and executive-level updates to programme boards, service leadership, and customer stakeholders
• Confirming the target operating model is ready before go-live, including support ownership, resolver groups, SLAs (Service Level Agreements), OLAs (Operational Level Agreements), and escalation paths
• Planning and coordinating knowledge transfer sessions for service desk, NOC (Network Operations Centre), engineering, and service management teams
• Owning service readiness assessments across people, process, tooling, monitoring, documentation, support model, knowledge management, and supplier dependencies
• Driving operational acceptance and formal service acceptance into business-as-usual (BAU) support
• Planning and managing Early Life Support (ELS) and hypercare periods, ensuring a smooth transition into steady-state operations
• Ensuring transition activity is aligned to change, release, and CAB (Change Advisory Board) governance, including go-live approvals, implementation, rollback, and communication plans
• Ensuring operational tooling, monitoring, alerting, asset data, CMDB (Configuration Management Database) records, and service dependencies are fully validated ahead of service acceptance

What we're looking for

• A proven Service Transition background within an MSP (Managed Service Provider) environment
• Strong process, transition, and governance discipline
• Solid working knowledge of cloud and networking technologies, including Microsoft, Meraki, and Fortinet
• Experience delivering into enterprise or mid-market accounts
• Strong understanding of ITIL Service Transition, Service Validation & Testing, Knowledge Management, Change Enablement, and Service Acceptance
• Comfortable managing complex, multi-stakeholder transitions under time pressure, with the ability to hit the ground running on live projects
• Experience managing transitions involving multiple suppliers and customer stakeholders
• Experience working with ServiceNow, CMDB management, and operational monitoring platforms

Desirable:

• Hospitality or multi-site retail sector experience
• ITIL or formal service transition qualifications
• Exposure to SD-WAN and network security transition