Director, User Services and Operations

Reporting to the Middlebury College’s Chief Information Officer (CIO), the Director for User Services and Operations oversees and directs a staff that provides technical support with excellent and reliable customer service to the institutions’ academic, administrative, and research staff for systems and services.

The Director, establishes best practices to serve clients across multiple service offerings and empowers and enables his/her operations team to deliver superior service. The role focuses on operational excellence, continuous improvement, and team development. This role establishes goals and success metrics that align with the overall business and client objectives while building client relationships at the operational level.

This position is a member of the CIO’s senior leadership staff and is responsible for ensuring that all phases of client services support are coordinated, monitored, logged, tracked, and resolved. Responsible for building and developing a high performing, customer-focused team that encompasses the functions of the IT help desk, desktop support, media technology services, student technology, telecommunications and public computing needs. Collaborates with the ITS Leadership team and staff members to plan and deliver effective and reliable campus services. Oversee department managers/supervisors in recruiting, onboarding, training, evaluating, managing and developing approximately 20 staff and 50 student employees

Offer of employment is contingent upon successful completion of a criminal background check.

• Strategic point of contact for senior clients and establish strong relationships. 

• Work with management team to bring creative solutions to prospective clients and to build the business of current clients.  

• Mentor and develop his/her team and direct them in finding creative solutions to both client and internal challenges, foster knowledge-sharing across all disciplines internally to ensure collaborative and informed work.

• Encourage respective discipline managers to implement creative solutions.

• Implement proprietary and 3rd party tools into the planning process

• Create an effective process and information flow between client services team and other disciplines

• Contribute to client’s business growth by identifying new opportunities

• Assist the Operations team with designing the training and implementation of all internal and external tools

• Foster a productive and empowering working environment

• Provide team with all necessary tools and training to improve core expertise and continued career growth

• Will lead multiple projects at once and ensure strong integration across the organization

• Lead new business efforts and determine the optimal staffing assignments for new initiatives

• Ensure that managers and supervisors are fully trained on all aspects of planning and audience reporting; will require use of research tools, as well as excellent writing and presentation skills

• Partner with peers in planning and creative agencies, and internal disciplines to work on existing or new business opportunities. 

• Provide regular updates to clients on the progress of customer service projects and campaigns that directly affect each client

• Develop open and effective channels of communication with each client that can be employed by other departments as well

• Coordinate internal projects and determine the best utilization of resources to increase customer satisfaction

• Become the reliable point of contact for each customer that is required to establish a strong business relation.

Perform other related duties as assigned.

Bachelor’s Degree in related field and ten years of related work experience or an equivalent combination of education, management, and leadership experience.

• Excellent communication and presentation skills. Ability to be develop a highly responsive team and keeping communication lines open at all times during client request fulfilment process.

• Ability to guide and develop the necessary KPI’s and an interactive dashboard view to provide complete transparency into IT operations.

• Excellent attention to detail with routine/complex daily functions, razor focused on operational stability as well as the ability to keep focused and productive with long-term projects in an inherently interrupt-driven job.

• An open, energetic, well grounded, innovative, success-oriented personality with a record of setting and surpassing objectives. Proven ability making sound judgments in a complex environment. Successful ability in managing and resolving conflict. 

• Skilled consensus builder with capacity to initiate and foster collaborative partnerships. Demonstrated ability with ticketing systems and customer service workflow. Demonstrated ability managing a team of customer service professionals.

• Strong understanding of technical troubleshooting methodology. Ability to work with a range of technical staff to develop joint solutions. Ability to facilitate problem-solving among diverse groups with varying needs and priorities, and to communicate well with the users, technical staff, and senior leadership.

• Knowledge of applicable laws, guidelines or regulations as they relate to IT. Strong leadership, coaching and mentoring skills.

• ITIL knowledge and ITIL certification is highly desirable.

Ten years of related work experience or an equivalent combination of education, management, and leadership experience.