Who are we?
Howden is a global insurance group with employee ownership at its heart. Together, we have pushed the boundaries of insurance. We are united by a shared passion and no-limits mindset, and our strength lies in our ability to collaborate as a powerful international team comprised of 24,000 employees spanning over 56 countries.
People join Howden for many different reasons, but they stay for the same one: our culture. It’s what sets us apart, and the reason our employees have been turning down headhunters for years. Whatever your priorities – work / life balance, career progression, sustainability, volunteering – you’ll find like-minded people driving change at Howden.
IT Support Team Lead
The IT Support Team Lead is responsible for leading the day-to-day delivery of IT support services, ensuring a high-quality end-user experience and effective resolution of technology issues across the business. This role provides operational leadership to the IT Support team, acting as a senior technical escalation point while ensuring service excellence, process compliance, and continuous improvement initiatives are successfully delivered.
Working closely with IT management, business stakeholders, and technology teams, the IT Support Team Lead manages support operations, monitors service performance, coaches and develops team members, and ensures support services align with business needs and service level commitments. The role combines technical expertise, people leadership, customer service excellence, and operational management to deliver dependable workplace technology services.
Location: Milton Keynes, Witney, London Office based 3 days per week.
Reporting Line: Global Service Delivery Manager
Travel Requirements: Occasional travel to UK office locations as required.
Work Pattern: Full Time, Permanent
Essential Duties and Responsibilities
Include, but are not limited to:
Lead, mentor, coach, and develop IT Support SME’s, fostering a culture of accountability, teamwork, continuous improvement, and customer focus.
Manage the daily operations of the IT Support function, ensuring support requests, incidents, and service requests are handled efficiently and professionally.
Act as the primary escalation point for complex technical issues
Monitor team workloads, queues, and performance to ensure SLA’s and customer satisfaction targets are consistently achieved.
Conduct regular team meetings, one-to-ones, performance reviews, and development planning activities.
Coordinate incident management activities and support major incident response when required.
Ensure effective ticket management practices are followed, including accurate categorisation, prioritisation, documentation, and resolution tracking.
Drive continual service improvement initiatives, identifying opportunities to optimise processes, automate repetitive tasks, and improve the user experience.
Maintain and promote knowledge management practices, ensuring support documentation and procedures remain accurate and current.
Collaborate with Infrastructure, Security, Applications, and Global IT teams to resolve cross-functional issues.
Support onboarding, offboarding, office moves, technology deployments, hardware refreshes, and business projects.
Monitor support trends and operational metrics, producing performance reports and recommendations for improvement.
Ensure compliance with IT policies, information security requirements, and company standards.
Assist in resource planning, shift scheduling, and coverage management to maintain support service availability.
Support vendor relationships and escalate service delivery concerns where appropriate.
Promote ITIL best practices across Incident, Request, Problem, Asset, and Knowledge Management disciplines.
Knowledge, Skills and Abilities
Education & Experience
Bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Business Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.
Minimum 5 years of experience in IT Support,…