Associate Director, Service Ops Lead - People Services and Reward

Job purpose: • Associate Director, Service Ops Lead - People Services and Reward   is responsible for ensuring the stable, compliant, and reliable operation of select systems and platforms within the HR Digital & Tech domain. The role oversees day-to-day platform operations and ensures that processes are followed, risks are managed, and changes are delivered safely. It maintains the operational performance of multiple platforms (e.g. Workday), ensuring they meet agreed service levels and adhere to security and compliance expectations. The role also provides leadership across operational service teams and partner-delivered support services, ensuring effective service delivery, proactive issue management, continuous improvement, and strong coordination across business, technology, security, infrastructure, product, and vendor teams.  • This role operates under GSK's "Performance with Choice" hybrid working approach, typically expecting 2–3 days per week in the office, with the specific pattern agreed between the successful candidate and their manager based on role and team needs.  Responsibilities : • Provide operational leadership across People Services and Reward platforms, ensuring system stability, availability, and adherence to service levels, acting as the primary internal escalation point for product and domain teams on service performance and major incidents.  • Govern incident, problem, change, configuration, and release processes for domain platforms, ensuring operational compliance with ITSM policies and control frameworks, and defining measurable outcomes for problem management (e.g., RCA closure time, recurrence prevention, defect trend reduction).  • Define and maintain service readiness and runbook quality standards (e.g. ServiceNow Knowledge), ensuring escalation paths, support tasks, data handling, continuity steps, and deployment impacts are captured and validated before go-live.  • Create and oversee service plans for new and enhanced products, coordinating with Product Owners, third-party partners, and platform/service teams to define SLAs, performance expectations, and support handover criteria.  • Monitor platform performance, proactively identifying risks, trends, and recurring issues, and implement improvement actions to strengthen stability and user experience.  • Coordinate with Platform Owners, engineering squads, solution architects, and service teams to ensure changes, integrations, upgrades, and releases are deployed safely and meet operational readiness standards.  • Lead operational readiness assessments, ensuring documentation, support models, monitoring coverage, and non-functional controls are in place prior to deployment.  • Own operational dashboards, KPIs, and reporting for the platforms, ensuring performance, risks, and issues are communicated to senior stakeholders.  • Oversee root cause analysis for major incidents, ensuring sustainable fixes, clear remediation actions, and preventative measures are identified and delivered.  • Maintain and continuously improve operational documentation, including runbooks, support procedures, configuration inventories, and architectural operational views.  • Manage relationships with third-party vendors and managed service providers to ensure high-quality operational support and fulfilment of contractual obligations.  • Lead, mentor, and coordinate operational support teams and partner resources across areas such as service desk, platform support, infrastructure, cloud services, and application operations, ensuring clear accountability, timely delivery, and effective escalation management.  • Collaborate with security, risk, compliance, infrastructure, product, and engineering teams to ensure access controls, data handling, cyber security req