Assistant Director - Live Services

Job summary

Youll be joining an organisation whose core mission is to save and improve lives. By ensuring the secure, reliable operation of its IT services, you will be making a direct contribution to meeting the needs of patients and hospitals throughout the country. More than that, however, youll be joining an organisation with ambitious plans to migrate its existing services to new technologies, exploring how we can define and deliver a resilient technology and network infrastructure that knits together cloud services with a virtualised data centre infrastructure and a high performing server environment. You will have an opportunity to lead and mentor a great team of technology professionals. Reporting directly to the Deputy CIO and a senior member of the DDTS Senior Management Team, you will gain exposure at Executive and Board level and be expected to demonstrate your understanding of technology and explain it in intelligible terms to a non-technical audience.

Note: Your contractual base will be one of (Bristol Filton Barnsley, Liverpool Centre, Manchester Centre, Tooting Centre, Colindale Centre). This is a hybrid role, and the expectation is this will be a mixture of at-home, working from base, visiting other NHSBT sites and in meetings with others. The number of days on-site will vary dependent on the needs of the business.

Main duties of the job

In this role, you will ensure the availability of critical national infrastructure for NHSBT staff, the NHS, and donors, meeting agreed service levels. Youll champion digital technologies to enhance productivity, collaboration, and flexible working. Key responsibilities will include:

1. Managing resources to ensure mission-critical IT services meet business needs, coordinating planned changes, and addressing issues and outages.

2. Leading the operational design of business-critical IT services, ensuring alignment with customer requirements, service levels, and management practices.

3. Driving continuous improvements using various tools and methods.

4. Implementing and maintaining controls, monitoring, and maintenance procedures for services and platforms.

5. Overseeing successful transitions of new and changed services into operational support, covering resources, tools, standards, and compliance.

6. Line managing Heads of Functions across Service Development, Portfolio Management, Business Services, and Operations.

As part of the DDTS Senior Management Team, you will collaborate to ensure changes in service definitions are understood and planned. You'll also integrate service and operations resources into strategic and operational plans.

Travel, irregular hours, and overnight stays may be required with prior notice. Participation in shift and on-call rotas, as well as providing cover during operational emergencies, is also expected.

About us

It takes all types of people to deliver the kind of service that saves and improves lives. At NHS Blood and Transplant, youll join a team of more than 6,000 people who are making a genuine difference to communities, families, friends, relatives and more across the UK. We play a unique and special role in the NHS by helping people do something extraordinary- donate blood, blood products, organs, tissues, or stem cells to save someone in need. Our three core values are what set us apart. They guide and inspire everything we do. By being caring, expertly meeting the needs of our patients and our people, and accepting nothing less than the best quality, we can do extraordinary work and help our people to do something extraordinary in their career, too. Three small words, one big difference - Caring, Expert and Quality. Together we'll save and improve more lives than ever. You will join us on our journey to create an inclusive workplace and aim to reflect the diverse communities we work with, and we positively encourage applications from all sectors of the community.