Global Service Desk Manager at International Rescue Committee

Job Overview/Summary: In the Global Service Desk Manager role you will be at the forefront of driving IT support across multiple regions, ensuring exceptional service delivery. This role offers you the chance to lead a diverse and ambitious team, fostering a culture of collaboration and accountability. Your ability to successfully to provide top-notch customer service will be crucial in maintaining IRC's esteemed reputation in providing help to our clients.

Major Responsibilities:

People Management

• Manage daily operations, and provide leadership, direction, and guidance to the team across regions globally. This includes hiring, training, scheduling, and evaluating performance.
• Develop a culture of accountability, ensuring roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and met.
• Identify skills gaps and coordinate training programs, cross-training initiatives, and upskilling opportunities to ensure team readiness and continuous growth.
• Coordinate with the Director of User Services, managing team resources emphasizing talent development, coaching, training, and team morale.
• Ensure that customer inquiries and issues are resolved promptly and professionally, following established procedures and standards.
• Manage staffing levels, shift coverage, and on-call schedules to ensure support coverage and service continuity across time zones.
• Foster a positive team culture by promoting open communication, collaboration, and recognition, while addressing morale or workload concerns promptly.
• Participate in hiring processes, onboarding new staff, and ensuring new team members are equipped with the tools, knowledge, and support needed to succeed.
• Ensure team objectives align with broader IT and business strategies, and track progress toward departmental KPIs and service excellence benchmarks.

Processes

• Drive process improvement by finding opportunities in workflow areas and work with others to implement change.
• Track key metrics to improve team efficiency and customer satisfaction, while leading initiatives to close performance gaps.
• Facilitate global Tech Support meetings to resolve recurring issues and drive continuous improvement.
• Track and analyze key performance metrics (e.g., SLA adherence, ticket volume trends, resolution times)
• Develop and execute action plans to address recurring issues, reduce ticket backlog, and streamline support processes through automation and standardization.
• Organize and lead regular problem-solving sessions with global Technical Support teams to align practices, resolve systemic issues, and promote knowledge sharing.
• Document and refine support procedures for unified support, and in compliance with ITIL.
• Support the rollout of new tools, processes, and policies by planning communication, training, and adoption strategies across regional teams.

Support

• Provide Tier 2 and Tier 3 technical support and solve complex and escalated issues across hardware, software and network environments, ensuring minimal disruption to end users.
• Act as the primary escalation point for critical incidents and blocking issues, ensuring timely resolution and clear communication with users, stakeholders, and partners.
• Deliver high-touch, white-glove support to senior leadership, especially in handling high-priority incidents, outages, or critical technical concerns.
• Work closely with infrastructure, security, applications, and service delivery teams to ensure system stability, continuous improvement, and alignment of support processes.
• Monitor, triage and coordinate responses to urgent tickets, service outages, and security-related incidents in collaboration with internal IT teams and external vendors.
• Support cross-team projects and implementation of IT initiatives and strategies, such as security enhancements, rollouts, infrastructure changes, and other tasks as determined by management.
• Ensure a high level of customer satisfaction by addressing concerns promptly, following up on resolutions, and maintaining transparent communication throughout the support process.
• Identify support process gaps and drive initiatives to improve response times, resolution quality, and knowledge documentation.

Administration

• Track KPIs across global regions and identify trends or anomalies.
• Provide executive summaries and insights for leadership.
• Support team communication by preparing reports and publishing regular newsletters for the Helpdesk team
• Assist with budgeting for tools, software, training, and staffing needs.
• Oversee onboarding processes for new Helpdesk staff globally.
• Track and schedule regular training sessions or certifications for the team.
• Ensure alignment to ITIL, SOPs, or other applicable service management frameworks.
• Support audit preparation by providing relevant documentation and records.
• Create and maintain global shift schedules to ensure continuous coverage.
• Track time-off requests, holidays, and coverage planning.
• Support coordination and documentation of major incident responses.
• .Lead the creation of comprehensive technical and user-friendly public-facing documentation to enhance customer self-help capabilities, streamline processes, and ensure consistency in service delivery.

Key Working Relationships: 

Position Reports to:  Director User Services                                                                      
Other Internal and external contacts: 

The team lead will work independently and in a team setting daily. They will interact with vendors as needed.

• Internal:  Team Leads, Technicians, System Engineers, Desktop Engineers, Network Engineers, Project Managers
• External:  Vendors: Phone Vendor, Printer Vendor, MAC Support, Microsoft Support, and others as needed.

Job Requirements: 

• Education: Bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Five years of demonstrable experience in IT support, including at least two years in a supervisory or managerial role. Ideally, this experience should have been gained in organizations with over 1,000 users across multiple locations.
• Certificates or Licenses:  ITIL Foundation, Administering Windows Server Hybrid Core Infrastructure (AZ-900), Azure Fundamentals (AZ-800), CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+

Work Experience: 

• Skilled in applying and running the ServiceNow ticketing system, including performance reporting, issue management, staff usage, and workflow process automation.
• Comprehensive knowledge of using Azure, O365 Administration, ADManager, Security, antivirus tools, etc.
• Proficient with services and products such as Microsoft Office 365, Windows 11, Mac OS, and PowerBI Pro.
• Good understanding of ITIL Service Management principles and practices.
• Ability to create and analyze metrics and statistics to identify trends.
• Experience in mentoring and handling meaningful discussions with calmness and clarity; ability to handle stressful environments.
• Solid skills in documentation, organization, and time management.
• Must be dedicated and know when to seek guidance; attention to detail is crucial.
• Flexibility, agility in changing priorities quickly, and capability to manage multiple tasks.
• Superb communication and interpersonal abilities, and ability to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Capability to continuously learn new technologies and apply them to meet customer needs.
• Proficiency in working autonomously while also engaging with colleagues across functions within a team.
• Stay updated on technology trends, developments, and standard methodologies.
• Audiovisual equipment support experience, including platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams.