Service Operations Specialist

At Honda we embrace inclusion in our various policies, so whilst our contracts state that the hours are as required to fulfil the role with a minimum of 35 hours per week, we offer flexibility for when you work.  The regular office hours are 08:00 – 16:00 Monday to Thursday with a half hour lunch break & 08:00 – 13:00 on a Friday.  However, we offer flexibility of when you work with our daily flex-time start of between 07:00 and 11:00 providing that there is no business requirement.

Whilst there is no contractual right to work from home, the flexibility we offer is that you can request to work from home 2 days per week, again providing there is no business requirement to attend the office. 

Role:
The Service Operations Specialist is responsible for the day-to-day operational management of Service Operations activity supporting HFE’s core systems, associated subsystems and interfaces, ensuring effective support to business users and the ongoing stability of production services. 

This role supports with developing a team of Service Operations Coordinators, allocating work, managing capacity, setting priorities, monitoring performance, and ensuring incidents, service requests, BAU tasks, and defect activity are progressed efficiently and in line with business priorities and service expectations.

The role also plays a key part in managing operational relationships with core banking system suppliers and other external providers, ensuring issues are understood, prioritised, tracked, and communicated effectively to stakeholders.

Main Responsibilities:

• Allocate and prioritise work across the team (incidents, requests, BAU tasks and defects) according to business criticality, risk, and capacity.
• Remove blockers, manage day-to-day escalations, and provide practical support to ensure the team can progress work effectively.
• Actively manage team capacity, coverage and workload balancing, ensuring effective resourcing and timely delivery.
• Oversee and coordinate production support activities to ensure incidents and requests are managed through to resolution and closure, maintaining service stability and user confidence.
• Own the operational management of queues and backlogs, including ageing, prioritisation, reallocation and escalation to meet service expectations.
• Carry out and/or coordinate regular Business as Usual (BAU) tasks that support core systems and HFE business teams, ensuring they are scheduled, tracked and completed.
• Manage production support with third-party providers of the core HFE banking systems to understand impacts, prioritise fixes, and track delivery.
• Maintain effective working relationships with internal Honda teams to ensure production issues are handled appropriately and in a timely manner.
• Ensure stakeholders are kept informed with the appropriate level of detail and frequency, translating operational and technical information into clear business impact and actions.
• Manage and regularly review processes and procedures for all support work, ensuring they remain current, practical, and consistently followed.
• Lead the effort in creative approaches to problem solving and quality deliverables supporting business needs, encouraging standardisation and simplification where appropriate.
• Identify recurring operational issues and drive improvement actions (including better knowledge, documentation, automation opportunities. 

Qualifications, skills and experience:
Required

• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills with the ability to: explain technical issues in a concise and non-technical manner to business users; keep stakeholders updated with the correct level of information.
• Strong knowledge and understanding of business needs, with the ability to establish and maintain a high level of customer trust and confidence.
• Demonstrated ability to motivate a team and to apply skills and techniques to solve problems.
• Proven ability to plan, allocate and prioritise workloads across a small operational team, balancing competing demands.
• Experience of collaborating with a team on tasks with the ability to present information to management of all levels.
• Proficient use of Microsoft Office including Word, Teams and Excel. 
• Ability to work on own initiative without direct supervision with a high commitment for delivery and quality. 

Desirable

• ITIL qualification and experience highly desirable.
• Experience in an application support/service desk role, ideally within the financial services or automotive sectors or with a consultancy practice. 
• Experience of operational reporting (KPIs, SLAs, backlog management) and using data to inform prioritisation and resource allocation.

Honda is committed to the principle of equal opportunity in the workplace for all employees, temporary workers, contractors, applicants and visitors. Honda also encourages respect for the individual differences and talents of others while making full use of one's own abilities, based on Honda's philosophy of respect for the individual.

At Honda, we value and celebrate diversity and are committed to being a fair, non-discriminatory company that promotes and welcomes the uniqueness and differences of people around the world. We recognise that a diverse workforce allows for different ideas and perspectives, and we encourage everyone to share them. We strive to foster a culture of belonging that is consistent with Honda's core values and lived out in the way we work and respect each other. For us at Honda, diversifying our workforce means increasing its overall strength by providing people with equal opportunities - regardless of personal characteristics or previous careers.

This commitment flows directly from the Honda philosophy and the belief that we are all working towards a common goal. Honda recruits, hires, trains and promotes the most qualified/experienced individuals at all levels without regard to race, origin, religion or belief, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability or any other protected characteristic.