Lead Change Manager

Join the Access Family and see how we make software ideas become a reality!

Our core value of ‘Love Work, Love Life, Be You’ has been central to our success and so we’re looking for people to join us who share our passion for making things better every day and help us continue to grow.

We are the number one UK headquartered software provider in the UK and are forecasted to grow to a global population of over 12,000 employees by 2026.

What are we all about?

At Access, we love software and how technology never stays the same. It's this obsession that drives us to work closely across sectors to understand the business needs of our customers - from the Hospitality sector, to Manufacturing industry, to Not for Profit’s to Construction, and many more.

We're passionate about helping our customers stay one step ahead of the challenges facing their industry and business, currently helping over 60,000 customers to have the freedom to do more.

About you:

With a track record in successful IT organisations and IT Service Management communities, particularly in leading the planning, coordination and execution of technical and business changes, you will bring a level of process, structure and governance to a fast-paced, rapidly-growing, global software and services organisation.

Reporting to the Head of Service Management, you will be responsible for defining and shaping the Change Management policies and processes, embedding these into the organisation and ensuring the are brilliantly executed. This includes the definition and rollout of a federated, pan-organisational change management model. The delivery of this model and realisation of benefits will significantly contribute to the reduction in volume and impact of major incidents and reactive changes, enabling us to further improve our proactive posture in the delivery of IT systems and services.

The scope of this role includes both internal Group IT, and also – via the federated model – external, customer-facing services.

Your assured presence, robust methods and first-class execution will ensure we realise these benefits and ‘win for our colleagues and customers’.

Day-to-day, you will:

• Report and support to the Head of IT Service Management in the continued evolution of our change management policies and processes
• Interface with technology support staff (technical engineers, including infrastructure and software) and business stakeholders, to foster collaboration and communication across a virtual working group.
• Create positive working relationships with business unit support personnel to build domain experience and product knowledge
• Work closely with the Major Incident and Problem Management teams to ensure that incidents resulting from changes are minimised, through the application of proactive best-practice
• Ensure appropriate high severity incident (HIS) and MI alerting and information is visibly integrated into the team, whether through monitoring or ticket management tooling (ITSM).
• Execute and continuously improve the enterprise-wide federated change management policy and process and ensure supporting artifacts and tooling are to the required standard (drive the change management lifecycle)
• Ensure change communications are timely, consistent and of the right quality to ensure all the right communities within the business have the information they need.
• Support the Head of IT Service Management in defining and delivering an IPC (incident, problem, change) continuous improvement roadmap that drives positive benefit in horizontal and vertical business units
• Bring domain expertise and thought leadership, with an eye on pace and pragmatism.
• Chair the change authority board (CAB), which includes colleagues / stakeholders from various geographic territories, occasionally (not frequently) requiring some working-hour flexibility (e.g. an occasional 8am call, UK time, to allow for APAC colleagues to participate)
• Ensure an appropriate library of Standard Changes is maintained at all times
• Create process lines (and approval workflows) for emergency, expedited, standard, normal, latent changes
• Ensure change templates are effective and pragmatic, allowing for clear risk & impact assessments to be undertaken and validated, prior to change authorisation
• Ensure roll-back plans are in place for each and every change
• Work with our in-house automation and data science team to automate the assessment of risk and, wherever possible (including time to next fault, likely location of next fault)
• Production of regular reports (weekly, fortnightly, monthly) to objectively describe progress in your area, including volume of incidents associated with change, volume of changes requiring roll-back, volume of changes approved first time (at CAB)
• Liaise with 3rd parties as required, in order to ensure prevention and resolution of incidents, problems, changes

Your skills and experiences might also include:

• 3+ years’ experience working in a corporate IT environment, a thorough understanding of service management, with at least 2 years demonstrable success in a Change Management role
• ITIL Foundation certified
• Solid experience of the Incident, Problem, Change disciplines within ITIL
• Experience in handling large customer / business IT incidents
• Working in commercially-sensitive environment, i.e. attuned to commercial pressures / drivers
• Excellent communication skills including formal presentations.
• Demonstrable awareness of business and operational environments.
• Proven ability to manage and motivate team members and lead by example
• Broad understanding of enterprise IT infrastructure (servers, networks), end-user-compute infrastructure (e.g. laptops, desktops, smart phones), corporate software (e.g. Microsoft 365 stack), common line of business software (e.g. SalesForce, SAP) and a basic understanding of the tools used in a bespoke software development house.
• Solid understanding of IT Service Management tools (ITSM), e.g. Fresh Service, Service Now, Remedy on Demand / Helix.
• Proven track record for proactively improving service delivery quality and reducing incoming demand / fallout

What does Access offer you?

We are a growing software company, and we deliver on what we say we do! We take the development of our people very seriously and we will work with you to carve out your success plan and an opportunity to accelerate your career and make a real difference.

On top of a competitive salary, our standard 25 days holiday (which goes up the longer you’re with us), and a matched pension scheme you’ll also be able to choose from a range of benefits to suit you. We pride ourselves on being an organisation that gives back so you’ll also have a charity day you can take to support something that matters to you.

At Access we’re all about helping everyone Love Work and Love Life. Why? Because we believe people can only be their best when they can be themselves. So, if you are excited about this role, but your past experience doesn’t match perfectly, we’d still love to hear from you. You might just be whom we are looking for.

We love the fact that we’re all different. We believe by having more diverse perspectives at work improves how we run our business, helps us to better support our customers, and when you think about it, it’s just more fun!

What’s holding you back? Come and be part of our Amazing Access Family!

Love Work. Love Life. Be You.