Service Design Lead at Computappoint, London Area, £500 per day

Our client, a leading insurance organisation, is seeking a highly capable consultant to play a critical role in ensuring new products and services are fully operationally ready before entering production.

This is an opportunity to have a genuine impact on a high-profile transformation programme where new services and products are being introduced into a complex enterprise environment.

You'll be trusted to operate with significant autonomy, taking existing project artefacts, identifying gaps, driving stakeholder engagement, and building comprehensive service designs that ensure successful operational transition and long-term supportability.

If you're someone who thrives on bringing structure to ambiguity, influencing senior stakeholders, and creating operational excellence, this role offers a platform to showcase your expertise.

Job Title: Service Design Lead

Job Type: Contract

Location: London (1-2 days on-site per week)

Day Rate: Up to £500/day (Outside IR35)

As the Service Design Lead, you will be responsible for taking emerging services through the end-to-end service design process and ensuring they are fully prepared for operational support and production deployment.

A significant part of the role will involve:

• Consuming existing project artefacts including Solution Architecture Documents, requirements, project documentation, workshop outputs, and design collateral.
• Independently engaging business, operational, technical, supplier, and support stakeholders to gather information and drive actions.
• Assessing services against established Service Acceptance Criteria and identifying risks, gaps, dependencies, and remediation activities.
• Taking Service Design Packs from approximately 10% complete to 90% complete with minimal oversight.
• Facilitating workshops where required to challenge assumptions, resolve issues, and drive consensus.
• Developing comprehensive service operating models, support models, governance structures, ownership models, escalation routes, and support boundaries.
• Defining SLAs, OLAs, KPIs, reporting requirements, service ownership, and support arrangements.
• Ensuring all operational readiness requirements are met before go-live.
• Working closely with architecture, engineering, security, operations, and business teams to support effective transition into BAU support.

What We're Looking For

• Proven experience as a Service Design Lead, Service Design Architect, Service Architect, Service Readiness Lead, or similar role.
• Strong experience taking partially defined services and building complete operational service designs.
• Demonstrable expertise across Major Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management, Service Request Management, Service Transition and Service Operations
• Significant experience facilitating workshops and managing senior stakeholders across technology and business functions.

Technical Requirements

• Strong practical understanding of ITIL 4.
• Deep knowledge of the ITIL 4 Service Value Chain and its application within enterprise organisations.
• Experience designing service governance frameworks, operating models, and operational readiness processes.
• Strong understanding of Service Transition and Service Operations best practices.
• Experience with ServiceNow and enterprise ITSM tooling is highly desirable.

We're looking for someone who can seamlessly step into an existing project, quickly absorb information, identify what's missing, and proactively drive the service design process forward.

You'll be comfortable challenging stakeholders, facilitating difficult conversations, owning actions through to completion, and returning a largely complete and review-ready Service Design Pack for final approval.