Change & Release Manager

About us

Halfords is on a journey - building the future of motoring and cycling and looking for people who want to help shape what comes next. We’re a place for cocreators: people who want to make a real impact, take ownership and be part of something that’s still evolving.

Technology at Halfords is at a turning point. We’re modernising our foundations, sharpening our delivery, and ensuring every technology decision is connected to real commercial and customer outcomes.

We're looking for people who act as trusted advisors to the business, take end-to-end accountability for outcomes, and can balance pace with long-term architectural integrity. Innovation here means practical, scalable solutions, not ideas that stay on whiteboards.

About the role

Join us as a Change & Release Manager and play a pivotal role in helping Halfords deliver technology change safely, efficiently and at pace across a complex, fast-moving retail environment. Working at the heart of our Service & Operations team, you'll lead the governance, coordination and continuous improvement of our change and release processes, ensuring new technology, platform updates and service enhancements are introduced seamlessly with minimal disruption to colleagues and customers.

This is an exciting opportunity to influence how technology change is delivered across the business. You'll collaborate with teams across Technology and the wider organisation to assess risk, manage release schedules and champion a modern change enablement approach that balances strong operational control with agility and innovation. If you're passionate about driving continuous improvement, reducing process friction and enabling high-quality technology delivery in a 24/7 environment, we'd love to hear from you.

Key responsibilities

• Own and evolve the organisation’s Change Management framework, ensuring technology changes are assessed, prioritised and delivered with the right level of governance, control and risk management.
• Coordinate release planning across technology teams, ensuring changes are scheduled effectively to minimise operational risk and service disruption.
• Champion safe, efficient technology delivery by embedding change processes that support modern ways of working while maintaining appropriate operational oversight.
• Lead change governance activities, facilitating advisory forums and ensuring risks, dependencies and operational readiness are clearly understood and managed.
• Provide clear and timely communication of planned changes and releases, giving stakeholders visibility of upcoming activities and potential business impacts.
• Drive operational readiness for technology releases, ensuring new and enhanced capabilities are supported through appropriate testing, validation and cross-functional coordination.
• Monitor and report on change performance, analysing success rates, failed changes and service impacts to identify trends and continuous improvement opportunities.
• Work closely with Service Assurance, Incident & Resilience, Engineering and Delivery teams to ensure changes are introduced safely and lessons learned are embedded into future processes.
• Continually improve change and release practices, reducing unnecessary complexity and process friction while maintaining service stability in a fast-paced 24/7 environment.
• Act as a trusted subject matter expert, promoting best practice and fostering a culture of accountability, collaboration and continuous improvement across Technology and the wider business.

About you

• Proven experience managing technology change and release processes within complex enterprise environments.
• Strong understanding of modern change management practices, balancing effective risk management with fast, efficient delivery.
• Experience coordinating releases across multiple teams, technologies and platforms.
• Skilled at assessing and managing operational risk, ensuring service stability in live environments.
• Confident working with technical, engineering, delivery and business stakeholders to plan and deliver successful releases.
• Highly organised, with the ability to manage multiple priorities and competing demands.
• Data-driven mindset, using performance metrics and insights to improve change success rates and release effectiveness.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence and collaborate at all levels.
• Desirable: Familiarity with ITSM platforms such as ServiceNow, along with experience across Agile, Waterfall and Continuous Delivery environments, cloud and hybrid technologies, and ITIL or other Service Management certifications.

Reward & benefits

• A fair and competitive salary evaluated against market data, car allowance, annual discretionary bonus scheme, pension, life assurance, 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays and enhanced family leave.
• Commitment and dedication to your ongoing personal and professional development. We help you to own and grow your potential so you can be at your best in your current role and to support your future career aspirations.

• We offer hybrid working in our Support Centre, you will be based at our Support Centre 3 days a week with an optional 2 days working from home.
• You will have access to a wealth of employee discounts across the Halfords suite of products and services.
• Wellbeing and inclusion are at the heart of our colleague experience. We offer resources and ongoing support to enhance your wellbeing at work and active Colleague Networks supporting inclusion initiatives across Halfords.

Not sure you meet all the criteria? We'd encourage you to take the wheel and apply anyway! At Halfords we are committed to creating an inclusive workplace for our colleagues. We're an equal opportunities employer and proud to welcome applications from all backgrounds and embrace diversity within our one Halfords Family.

At Halfords, we operate a hybrid working policy with 3 days on site at our Support Centre in Redditch.