Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT Service Manager

💰 $90,000 - $140,000

ITService ManagementITSMOperations

🎯 Role Definition

The IT Service Manager is accountable for the operational delivery, availability, performance and continual improvement of IT services aligned to business needs. This leader owns incident, problem and change management practices, enforces SLAs/OLAs, manages vendor relationships and drives cross-functional collaboration to ensure reliable, secure and cost-effective IT service delivery. The role requires hands-on experience with ITSM tooling (ServiceNow, BMC Remedy, JIRA Service Management), strong stakeholder skills, and demonstrated success in implementing ITIL-based processes and service improvement programs.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior IT Support / Team Lead (Technical Support Lead, Desktop Services Lead)
  • Incident & Problem Manager or Change Manager
  • IT Operations Specialist / Systems Administrator

Advancement To:

  • Senior IT Service Manager / Head of Service Delivery
  • IT Operations Director / Director of IT Service Management
  • VP of IT Operations or Chief Information Officer (CIO) for enterprise-scale environments

Lateral Moves:

  • Service Delivery Manager for Cloud or Security Services
  • Vendor & Partner Management Lead
  • IT Program/Project Manager (cross-functional programs)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Own and drive the end-to-end IT service delivery lifecycle including incident management, problem management, change control, release coordination and service request fulfillment to meet business SLAs and KPIs.
  • Lead a 24x7 service management function by creating rosters, escalation matrices and continuity plans; ensure availability and operational readiness for business-critical systems.
  • Act as the single point of accountability for service performance, availability and operational stability across multiple applications, infrastructure and cloud services.
  • Develop, monitor and report against SLA/OLA/UC targets; analyze trends and produce executive dashboards and weekly/monthly operational reports to communicate performance to stakeholders and leadership.
  • Manage major incidents and production outages: coordinate technical resources, communicate status to stakeholders, run post-incident reviews (RCA), drive corrective actions and ensure lessons learned are codified into prevention plans.
  • Establish and enforce standardized change management processes including CAB governance, risk assessment, emergency change handling and rollback plans to minimize service disruption.
  • Lead problem management efforts to identify root causes, prioritize systemic issues, sponsor fixes and eliminate recurring incidents through long-term remediation and architecture input.
  • Own service improvement programs (Continual Service Improvement) to reduce MTTR, reduce incident volumes, automate repetitive tasks and improve customer satisfaction (CSAT).
  • Manage vendor and third-party relationships (outsourced support, cloud providers, MSPs): define SLAs, KPIs, contract performance reviews and escalation processes to ensure supplier accountability.
  • Partner with security, compliance and risk teams to ensure IT services meet regulatory and security requirements, implement patch management programs and drive secure operational practices.
  • Design and maintain runbooks, operational playbooks and knowledge bases to ensure consistent support quality, faster onboarding and reduced dependency on individual subject matter experts.
  • Coordinate cross-functional incident response and disaster recovery exercises, validate business continuity plans and ensure recovery objectives (RTO/RPO) are achievable and tested regularly.
  • Drive automation and tooling improvements in ITSM platforms (ServiceNow, BMC Remedy, JIRA, or homegrown) to streamline workflows, reduce manual effort and improve reporting fidelity.
  • Lead, mentor and manage the service desk, incident managers and technical operations teams: hire, coach, run performance reviews and develop career paths to build a high-performing service organization.
  • Own budget and cost control for service operations including staffing, tooling, vendor spend and continuous improvement investments while identifying cost optimization opportunities.
  • Collaborate with release, change, platform and application teams to ensure new deployments and releases are production-ready and supported with appropriate runbooks and monitoring.
  • Implement proactive monitoring, observability and alerting strategies in partnership with SRE/DevOps teams to detect and remediate issues before they impact customers.
  • Serve as the primary liaison between business stakeholders and technical teams; translate business priorities into service management objectives and negotiate priorities during major incidents and releases.
  • Ensure consistent measurement of service health using KPIs such as MTTR, MTBF, SLA attainment, incident backlog, CSAT/NPS and change success rate, and present insights to executive leadership.
  • Lead continuous improvement initiatives using Lean, Six Sigma or ITIL CSI techniques to streamline workflows, reduce waste and improve time-to-resolution.
  • Ensure accurate capacity forecasting and performance tuning collaboration with infrastructure and cloud teams to avoid service degradation during peaks.
  • Drive standardization of processes, nomenclature and configuration items (CIs) within the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and maintain data integrity to support service operations.
  • Develop and maintain effective communication plans and status updates during severe incidents, ensuring clear and consistent messaging to internal and external stakeholders.
  • Define and implement service catalog offerings and service request workflows to ensure simple self-service experiences and clear service entitlements for end users.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis related to service performance and incident trends.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap by identifying telemetry and reporting requirements that inform service improvements.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements and actionable service initiatives.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within cross-functional teams to align service objectives with engineering delivery.
  • Assist in vendor onboarding evaluations by providing operational requirements, compliance checks and runbook readiness assessments.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • ITIL 4 foundation (or ITIL v3 with working knowledge of v4) — experienced in applying ITIL processes to incident, change, problem and service catalog management.
  • ServiceNow administration and configuration (or BMC Remedy / JIRA Service Management) — implement workflows, automation, and reporting.
  • Incident management and major incident coordination — hands-on experience running post-mortems, RCA and corrective action plans.
  • Change and release management — proven success designing CAB processes, emergency change procedures and release gating.
  • SLA/OLAs and service performance reporting — building executive dashboards, KPI definitions and actionable insights.
  • Vendor and contract management — managing MSPs, cloud providers and third-party support vendors with contractual SLAs and performance metrics.
  • Cloud operational experience (AWS, Azure, GCP) — understanding of cloud services, cost controls and cloud incident handling.
  • Monitoring, observability and APM tools (Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, Splunk) — design alerting and triage playbooks.
  • Scripting and automation basics (PowerShell, Python, Bash) or orchestration tools to automate routine operational tasks and integrations.
  • Configuration Management and CMDB governance — maintain accurate CI records and ensure lifecycle management of assets.
  • Security & compliance awareness — familiarity with ISO27001, SOC2, GDPR and secure operations best practices.
  • IT operations tooling integrations — API/integration experience linking ITSM tools to monitoring, CI/CD and alerting platforms.
  • Budgeting and financial management for IT services — P&L awareness and cost optimization experience.

Soft Skills

  • Strong stakeholder management and communication — able to translate technical status into business impact and executive-level summaries.
  • Leadership and people management — coaching, conflict resolution, and building resilient, accountable teams in a 24x7 environment.
  • Analytical mindset with data-driven decision-making — skilled at using metrics to prioritize work and measure improvement.
  • Customer-oriented with focus on user experience and CSAT improvements across support channels.
  • Problem solving and critical thinking — ability to lead RCA, identify root causes and guide remediation to prevent recurrence.
  • Resilience and calm under pressure during major incidents — effective crisis management and rapid decision-making.
  • Negotiation and vendor escalation skills — enforce contractual SLAs while maintaining productive provider relationships.
  • Continuous improvement and change leadership — championing process change with minimal disruption.
  • Cross-functional collaboration and influencing without authority — work effectively across engineering, security, business and third-party teams.
  • Time management and prioritization — handling competing priorities during incidents, releases and business demand.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Information Technology, Business Administration or related field; or equivalent experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in IT Management, Business Administration (MBA) or related advanced degree.
  • ITIL 4 Practitioner / ITIL Intermediate certifications, ServiceNow Administrator, Certified ScrumMaster (optional).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Systems / Information Technology
  • Business Administration / Management
  • Engineering (Electrical, Systems, DevOps-related)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 5 to 10+ years in IT operations, support or service management roles.

Preferred:

  • 7+ years of progressive experience with at least 3 years in a formal IT Service Manager, Service Delivery Manager or Incident/Problem Manager role.
  • Demonstrated experience with enterprise ITSM platforms (ServiceNow/BMC/JIRA), managing 24x7 operations, vendor management and leading cross-functional service improvement programs.
  • Experience in cloud operations (AWS/Azure/GCP), security/compliance aligned environments, and running major incident processes for production-critical services.
Explore More Careers