Service Delivery Manager

Focus Financial Partners; St. Louis (MO); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Focus Financial Partners in St. Louis seeks a Service Delivery Manager, Technology Operations, to oversee day-to-day service delivery across multiple towers, ensuring reliable and measurable outcomes for internal consumers and the Managed Services Partner.

This role emphasizes governance, escalation, and continuous improvement rather than hands-on engineering, aligning services with contractual commitments, performance metrics, and industry standards.

Qualifications

• Experience in service delivery management, vendor/partner oversight, IT operations governance, or similar leadership roles.
• Proven ability to manage service performance through SLAs, dashboards, reviews, and escalation management.
• Strong understanding of ITSM practices and ServiceNow-based operating models.

Responsibilities

• Own day-to-day service delivery oversight for assigned towers across networks, servers, cloud, monitoring, and identity management.
• Monitor SLA/KPI performance, ticket flow, backlog aging, and runbook adherence to drive closure.
• Serve as the primary operational accountability between Focus Financial Partners and the Managed Services Partner.
• Coordinate major incidents with clear ownership, remediation plans, and post‑incident reviews.
• Maintain governance discipline using ServiceNow workflows, change management, and auditable records.

Skills

Service delivery management

Vendor/partner management

IT operations governance

ITSM

ServiceNow

Escalation management

Job description

Job Description Summary

The Service Delivery Manager, Technology Operations, is an operational governance role within Infrastructure Operations & Architecture (IO&A). This role serves as the primary day-to-day interface between internal service consumers, internal technology stakeholders, and the Managed Services Partner for assigned service towers.

The SDM is accountable for service performance, partner accountability, issue escalation, stakeholder communication, and continuous improvement. The role is intentionally administrative, commercial, and outcomes-focused: the SDM manages service delivery, contract expectations, operating discipline, and measurable outcomes rather than acting as a hands-on keyboard technician.

Each SDM must be conversant in the infrastructure domains for which they are responsible, but deep technical engineering is not the primary success factor. Success is measured by the SDM's ability to ensure the partner delivers reliable, transparent, standards-aligned services; address performance issues before they become systemic; and stand in the middle of the outsourced partner and the consumer of services to deliver best-in-class service experience.

Job Description

Key Responsibilities

Manage Service Delivery Performance for Assigned Service Towers

• Own day-to-day service delivery oversight for assigned towers such as Network Administration, Server & Storage Administration, Cloud Infrastructure Services, Monitoring & Event Management, Infrastructure Protection, and Identity & Access Management.
• Monitor service health, ticket flow, SLA/KPI compliance, backlog aging, reopen/rework trends, runbook adherence, escalation accuracy, and service consumer sentiment for assigned services.
• Ensure service issues are visible, tracked, assigned, and driven to closure through documented action plans rather than informal follow-up or undocumented commitments.

Govern Managed Services Partner Execution

• Serve as the primary operational point of accountability between FFP and the Managed Services Partner for assigned services.
• Hold the partner accountable for promised service outcomes, documentation, reporting, escalation responsiveness, operating discipline, and adherence to FFP standards.
• Manage contract and operating expectations in partnership with the Director, Technology Operations, VMO, ITSM/Process & Tooling, service owners, and partner leadership.

Represent the Consumer of Services

• Stand between the outsourced partner and the consumer of services to ensure service experience, communication, prioritization, and responsiveness meet FFP expectations.
• Build trusted relationships with internal IT teams, business stakeholders, Service Desk, architecture, security/risk, and integration stakeholders who consume or depend on assigned services.
• Translate service consumer pain points into measurable partner actions, service improvement opportunities, and clear escalation paths.

Lead Escalation, Issue Management, Major Incident Coordination, and Service Recovery

• Coordinate escalations for service degradation, missed commitments, recurring incidents, customer-impacting issues, and partner delivery breakdowns.
• Ensure major issues have clear ownership, decision path, communication rhythm, impact statement, and remediation plan.
• Drive post-issue follow-up to confirm root cause, corrective action, preventive action, and documented learning are completed.
• Coordinate operational response during major incidents, service disruptions, and recurring service issues by ensuring the appropriate partner, internal operations, communication, and leadership stakeholders are engaged.
• Maintain accountability for operational coordination, stakeholder communication, partner execution, escalation visibility, and follow-through while engaging Service Portfolio Architects and Design & Delivery Engineers for technical consultation, root‑cause themes, design implications, and longer-term remediation recommendations.
• Ensure lessons learned from major incidents and recurring issues are translated into service improvement actions, partner performance expectations, runbook updates, monitoring improvements, standards feedback, or roadmap inputs as appropriate.

Maintain Operational Governance Discipline

• Ensure all partner work is tracked in FFP's ServiceNow instance and that incidents, requests, changes, problem records, and improvement actions are managed through approved workflows.
• Ensure partner activities comply with FFP Change Management, CAB requirements, ARB/TRM guardrails, operational standards, runbook expectations, and service acceptance criteria.
• Maintain clean operational hygiene: accurate ticket ownership, timely updates, correct categorization, clear resolution notes, and auditable service records.

Drive Continuous Improvement and Service Maturity

• Create a culture where the partner proactively identifies operational improvements, automation candidates, process defects, reporting needs, runbook gaps, and service simplification opportunities.
• Partner with Process & Tooling to prioritize recurring issue reduction, workflow improvements, dashboard enhancements, automation/AI opportunities, and measurable service maturity actions.
• Track continuous improvement commitments through completion and ensure delivered improvements produce measurable impact on service quality, cycle time, ticket deflection, or stakeholder experience.
• Provide Service Portfolio Architects with operational performance trends, recurring incident themes, lifecycle risks, supportability gaps, partner execution concerns, and service consumer feedback to inform roadmap, modernization, lifecycle, and service improvement planning.
• Provide Design & Delivery Engineers with operational lessons learned, supportability concerns, transition issues, hypercare outcomes, and runbook or monitoring gaps that should be incorporated into future designs, delivery patterns, implementation plans, and support-transition practices.
• Reinforce a closed-loop improvement model where production support experience informs service standards, service blueprints, runbooks, design patterns, operational controls, and partner enablement materials.

Own Operational Readiness, Service Acceptance, Hypercare Exit, Runbook, Knowledge, and Transition Readiness for Assigned Services

• Ensure assigned services have accepted runbooks, operating procedures, escalation paths, knowledge articles, monitoring expectations, access requirements, and partner readiness plans.
• Participate in operational readiness reviews for new or changed capabilities moving from Architecture, Design & Delivery into steady-state operations.
• Confirm partner training, support model, service acceptance criteria, and documentation are complete before operational handoff or expanded partner responsibility.
• Own operational acceptance from a Technology Operations perspective by confirming that monitoring, alerting, runbooks, escalation paths, access requirements, recovery procedures, support documentation, knowledge transfer, support model ownership, and operational controls are sufficiently complete before steady-state transition.
• Partner with Service Portfolio Architects to validate that service acceptance criteria align with service standards, portfolio roadmap expectations, lifecycle requirements, cybersecurity expectations, and long-term supportability needs.
• Partner with Design & Delivery Engineers during implementation, validation, hypercare, transition planning, and knowledge transfer to ensure the Managed Services Partner and support teams are prepared to operate new or changed services.

Lead Service Review Cadence and Performance Reporting

• Prepare and facilitate operational reviews for assigned services, including weekly operational sync inputs, monthly service reviews, QBR materials, and recurring improvement status.
• Use data to tell a clear service story: what is performing, what is degrading, where consumers are experiencing friction, what the partner is doing about it, and where leadership action is needed.
• Maintain action logs, escalation trackers, service health summaries, and partner follow-up items with clear owners, due dates, and status visibility.
• Include Service Portfolio Architects and Design & Delivery Engineers in service review discussions when operational trends, recurring incidents, technical debt, supportability gaps, roadmap alignment, or transition quality require cross-functional review or corrective action.

Support Contract, Financial, and Commercial Accountability

• Help validate whether partner performance aligns to contracted scope, expected outcomes, service levels, and agreed operating assumptions.
• Identify potential scope ambiguity, demand patterns, service volume changes, chargeable activities, and recurring service issues that may require commercial, contract, or governance attention.
• Support annual efficiency, automation impact, and service value reporting by ensuring assigned service data is complete, reliable, and tied to measurable outcomes.

Required Qualifications

• Experience in service delivery management, vendor/partner management, IT operations governance, ITSM, managed services oversight, or similar operational leadership roles.
• Demonstrated ability to manage service performance through SLAs/KPIs, operational dashboards, service reviews, action tracking, stakeholder communication, and escalation management.
• Strong understanding of ITSM practices and ServiceNow-based operating models, including incident, request, change, problem, knowledge, and reporting disciplines.