Global Service Desk Manager at International Rescue Committee

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.