The service delivery manager at the heart of team management

What is a service delivery manager?

Within a company, the service delivery manager is the person in charge of service contracts who is responsible for delivering a service, according to the terms of the contract, in compliance with the costs, deadlines and quality of the service requested. In this capacity, he/she manages the quality indicators, the project actors and the financial part of the contracts for which he/she is responsible. He must identify the service or project to be delivered, take ownership of it and manage it perfectly.

To do this, he scrupulously ensures that the service levels defined contractually with all project participants are respected. This means that he must ensure the smooth operational flow between the users and the development teams. The processing of requests must therefore correspond to expectations, while taking into account the constraints of information systems.

In general, the service delivery manager’s job places great emphasis on feedback from users or customers in order to improve service levels, limit operational risks and facilitate communication between technical teams and users.

The important role of the service delivery manager

There are several reasons why a service delivery manager should be provided or created:

– When the project involves many participants with several different levels of service, the service delivery manager creates cohesion and ensures that the agreements previously made between the IT teams and the client (SLA or Service Level Agreement) are respected.

– When the terms of the service contract are in question, the role of the service manager is to avoid a situation of litigation, where the stakeholders cannot reach a consensus.

– When the client proceeds with a quality or certification process, the contract manager is essential for risk management and continuous improvement of the project.

The main activities of the service delivery manager

The job of service delivery manager is transversal. Its mission is to ensure the satisfaction of business users for all services used. It intervenes on several aspects in order to offer a better visibility of the service provided. To this end, it carries out several missions.

In fact, it participates in the elaboration of the service contract and must define the content and all the rules of implementation by the services by relying on the SLA and SLR agreements (Service Level Requirement or customer requirements at the IT level, programming language, etc.).

It ensures that the commitments made are respected by referring to the SLA and SLR. To succeed in this task, it is essential to describe the processes, to set up a schedule and a progress plan with the different action plans to be executed. However, any impact or change in the teams’ schedule forces him to be extremely vigilant about the commitments made and the possible delays in service delivery.

He must follow the objectives to be reached, which he will evaluate thanks to quality indicators and follow-up dashboards.

His role is also to financially monitor the service contract and determine how the budget is allocated based on the progress of the project.

Thanks to his cross-functional approach, he manages different operational and technical teams, as well as support services, etc. To fulfill this role, he/she must lead the steering or monitoring committees, including the presentation of developments and upcoming steps, the ongoing action plan, etc. In short, it is the privileged point of contact for users and development teams.

He is the guarantor of the methodology used on the service contract. If the contract includes maintenance: the service delivery manager must distinguish between anomalies and evolutions. Changes are sometimes negotiated between the service delivery manager and the customer. The anomaly is the consequence of a failure of the project team. It must be solved without additional budget. The categorization between evolution and anomaly is therefore extremely important.

At this level, the contract manager is required to collaborate with the third party application maintenance (TMA). He therefore has a key role in identifying malfunctions and must be able to initiate appropriate corrective action plans. Finally, he/she will have to draw up documents on the processes in the event of an incident.

Thus, through all these tasks, the service manager’s ultimate goal is customer satisfaction and the constant improvement of the company’s processes. To guarantee the success of a project, its work depends on 3 determining factors:

– optimized management of the financial part,

– the usefulness of the tool and its performance,

– the ability to resolve malfunctions and anomalies,

– the ability to maintain a dialogue with both the client and the team.

To conclude, the job of contract manager requires a perfect mastery of ITIL fundamentals. In addition, a few professional skills are essential for success in this profession. It is necessary to know how to federate the various stakeholders around the project and to coordinate the teams between them. Negotiation and communication skills, which facilitate customer relations, must not be forgotten.

Also read in our “project governance” file:

• Project comitology: the governance bodies of an IT project and their roles
• Steering and governance of an HR project: which profiles should be involved?
• Steering and governance of a Finance IS project: which profiles should be involved?
• Steering and governance of an IT project: which profiles should be involved?
• Project governance: what role for the steering committee?
• The actors of a project team: organisation, role and skills
• The IS manager at the heart of the development and evolution of systems
• HRIS Manager: what role in the evolution of HR Information Systems?
• IS project manager : what role and responsibility in an IS project?
• Functional consultant: a role close to the business processes
• Technical consultant: a profession at the heart of technological development
• Solution architect : a profession that manages development and deployment
• DevOps Consultant: role, missions and development skills
• Data Protection Officer (DPO): what roles and missions?
• CISO: a key job within the business for system security
• The service delivery manager at the heart of team management
• Scrum master, a key profession for Scrum project management
• Data scientist: a strategic profession at the service of management
• MOA / MOE: how are the roles divided on an information system implementation project?