Service Delivery Manager (SDM)

Job description:

• The primary responsibility is to interface with customers for daily operational and project needs
• Delivers contracted services by attending customer meetings, status communications, periodic reporting, complete project management, etc.
• Through ticket assignments, task listing, prioritization and workload balancing ensures technical resources have clarity of what they need to execute day to day

Customer Interaction
• This is primarily an outbound role i.e. activities you will be responsible for will directly involve customers or a representative at our US office, and is communication heavy rather than troubleshooting or task execution
• Attend scheduled meetings (conference calls) with customers and US counterparts for regular work planning and projects. Sometimes will be the primary driver of these meetings i.e. responsible for coming up with the proper agenda items and lead the conversation, prepare and circulate minutes of meeting.
• Develop and maintains a professional and effective relationship with customer representatives
• Customer onboarding and customer satisfaction
• Assist leads and others in getting the query clarified from customer
• Take customer feedback, analyze and suggest required changes in process and quality
Project Management
• Project planning: Prepare project plan and customize templates per the technologies and customer specifics. Responsible for taking a project work breakdown structure (produced by a technical architect for example) and turn into a professional project plan with resource assignments, dependencies, milestones, critical path identification, cost estimation and optimization etc.
• Project maintenance: Keeps the projects running in parallel to day to day operations tracked as a separate work stream, ensuring resourcing is done and completion dates are feasible. Does time and cost accounting for projects and submits timesheets to accounts for invoicing project work.

Process Leadership
• Reporting: Responsible for service level agreement (SLA) adherence and reporting to customer and Stratogent management. Compile the required reports (monthly, weekly or quarterly)
• Excellent communication on the issues to technical team, leads and managers, ensure other managers & leads are aware of the changes which are being planned for near future
• Identify or Escalate issues to the seniors, if the technical delivery is not happening as per the expectations
• Shift handover utilizing email and other tools to the next shift SDM with the details of task status (pending/complete), status of project work or any other important communications
Incidents & Requests
• Ticketing system owner for overall work queue for a set of customers. The focus is on completeness of ticket triage, ensuring timely updates to tickets, and proper prioritization and assignments
• Task list creation: Determines what work items are active, what the customer expects (not the implementation details), communicates ETA and priorities. Routes task items to the leads for distribution among the team
• Task status communication: Communicates status updates to the task list back to customer, when necessary
• Escalation management: Acts as interface with customer or with the US SDM depending on the client, takes heat and manages expectations when things go wrong. Manages and mitigates crisis incidents through excellent coordination. Keeps all the necessary stake holders updated all times
Cost and Quality
• Track and report the quality of deliverables and work with Leads and Managers for improvement of the same
• Track and report resource utilization for the set of customers.
• Track customers operational service cost, project cost and profitability

Skills

Must-have Experience: • Must have a technical background, with prior hands-on experience of windows server administration • Must have service mindset and empathy. Must deal with a level of ambiguity, chaos and apparent stubbornness from customers, and manage around it by thinking through the issue or request from the customer’s perspective to drive to a reasonable conclusion • Must have prior experience on Project Management • Must have prior experience of onsite-offshore delivery model and should have directly worked with US/European customers or colleagues • Must have ITIL process knowledge Good-to-have-experience • Prior experience working at an ISP/Managed Services/IT Services company is preferred, and a background in dealing with global teams and remote teams will be a strong plus. • Certification in PMP and ITIL will be a strong plus • A strong plus would be breadth of technical experience i.e. candidate has done enough in Linux, exchange, VMware, cloud, networking, storage, backups etc.