Senior Service Design & Transition Manager

The Senior Service Design & Transition Manager is responsible for ensuring new and enhanced services are designed, transitioned, and governed effectively across the EMAP region. The role provides leadership for service design, SLA governance, operational readiness, and service transition activities, working closely with Product, Commercial, Service Operations, Application Support, PMO, Platform, and regional stakeholders. The role also drives continual service improvement initiatives and supports strategic programmes, including service pack upgrades and SaaS transformation activities where required. The successful candidate will operate across EMEA and APAC, collaborating with stakeholders across multiple countries and time zones to ensure services are supportable, scalable, commercially viable, and aligned to business objectives.   Service Design & SLA Governance Lead the design, review, and governance of service models, support frameworks, SLAs, OLAs, and operational service commitments. Partner with Commercial, Sales, Product, Service Operations, and Client teams to develop service solutions that meet customer requirements while remaining operationally supportable. Support strategic bids, RFPs, client opportunities, and service proposals through service design, supportability assessment, and service management expertise. Ensure consistency and governance across all service design documentation and service management processes. Identify gaps between contractual commitments and operational capabilities and drive appropriate remediation actions. Maintain and evolve standardised service design frameworks, SLA templates and governance standards across EMAP. Review new and bespoke service requirements, assessing operational feasibility, supportability, risks and support implications prior to customer or market commitments. Provide service management input to go-to-market activities, ensuring customer commitments, support arrangements and operational capabilities are aligned prior to launch.   Service Transition and Operational Readiness Lead service transition activities for new products, services, clients and major enhancements across EMAP. Establish and govern operational readiness frameworks, transition plans and acceptance criteria. Ensure support teams are prepared through effective knowledge transfer, documentation, training, monitoring and support procedures. Coordinate cross-functional transition activities, managing dependencies, risks, assumptions and operational impacts. Facilitate service acceptance and successful handover into BAU support.   Service Governance and Continuous Improvement Drive improvements to service management practices, governance frameworks, and operational processes. Continuously Identify opportunities for automation to improve efficiency, reduce operational risk, and increase service maturity. Analyse recurring operational issues and drive improvement initiatives. Facilitate governance forums, service review meetings and stakeholder engagements, providing clear reporting, recommendations and decision support. Develop dashboards, metrics, and reporting to measure service performance, operational maturity, service readiness, and improvement outcomes.   Release Planning and Coordination: Support governance and coordination of service upgrades and transformation initiatives across EMAP. Collaborate with Product, Delivery, Support and Business stakeholders to manage upgrade scope, timelines, dependencies, risks and communications. Ensure service readiness, support preparedness and operational acceptance requirements are met for major upgrades and releases.   Service Management: Support the adoption of strategic platform and service enhancements by ensuring appropriate governance, readiness planning and stakeholder engagement. Govern and track security vulnerability remediation plans associated with software releases, ensuring risks, actions and ownership are clearly managed an