Service Desk Lead: Drive IT Excellence & Team Growth

Places for People; Cuerden Green; On-site; GBP 42,000 - 58,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Pension with matched contributions up 

Bonus scheme 2%

35 days holiday (incl. bank holidays)

Healthcare cashback plan

Wellbeing support and EAP

Discretionary Wellbeing and Rewards

Training & career progression

Recognition programmes

Inclusion and colleague engagement

Free Places Gyms membership

Life Assurance

Job summary

Places for People is seeking an experienced Service Desk Lead to manage the daily operations, guide a team of IT Service Desk Engineers and ensure a customer‑focused service. You will monitor queue health, allocate workloads and oversee incidents to meet agreed SLAs, while driving improvements through data and collaboration with incident and problem teams.

You will also lead knowledge management, coaching, and performance reviews, contributing to recruitment and onboarding.

Qualifications

• Leadership or supervisory experience in technical support or IT service desk.
• Strong understanding of IT service management including incident, request and problem management.
• Experience managing support demand while meeting service levels and performance targets.
• Ability to lead, coach and develop technical support colleagues.
• Experience using ITSM tools to oversee incidents, workloads and service performance.
• Experience liaising with multiple business functions and leading reviews.

Responsibilities

• Lead day‑to‑day operation and performance of the Service Desk.
• Allocate workloads, monitor backlog and coordinate escalations to meet SLAs.
• Analyse performance against KPIs and drive process improvements.
• Provide escalation support for complex issues with 2nd/3rd line teams.
• Maintain knowledge management and promote learning.
• Contribute to recruitment, onboarding and performance reviews.
• Contribute to IT policies and best practices for consistent service delivery.

Skills

Leadership

ITSM

Incident management

Service delivery

Stakeholder management

Team coaching

Workload management

Education

ITIL Foundation (advantageous)

Tools

ITSM tools

Job description

Places for People is seeking an experienced Service Desk Lead to manage the daily operations, guide a team of IT Service Desk Engineers and ensure a customer‑focused service. You will monitor queue health, allocate workloads and oversee incidents to meet agreed SLAs, while driving improvements through data and collaboration with incident and problem teams.

You will also lead knowledge management, coaching, and performance reviews, contributing to recruitment and onboarding.