MSP Platforms & Standards Lead

Department: Technical Operations

Location: Shoreham-by-Sea

Compensation: £50,000 / year

MSP Platforms & Standards Lead

Location: Shoreham (hybrid working)

Salary: Up to £50,000

Focus Group is a £300m-revenue, 1,500-person technology services company backed by Hg Capital. Following our $1bn valuation in 2024, we’re scaling rapidly and investing in AI (artificial intelligence) to transform how we operate and how we serve our 30,000 SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) customers.

As we continue to expand our portfolio and grow through acquisition, we’re committed to setting new industry standards in managed service excellence. We want to redefine what world-class technical support means in today’s fast-moving technology landscape.

As our MSP Platforms & Standards Lead, you’ll play a pivotal role in our Operations team. MSP stands for managed service provider, which is the type of IT support company we are. You’ll own the day-to-day technical management of the core platforms our MSP runs on, and you’ll define and drive the Technical Standards we hold our valued customers’ IT environments to. You’ll combine looking after our platforms and vendors with proactively checking customer environments. You’ll work closely with practice leads (the heads of our specialist technical areas), change teams, the service desk, engineering and sales to spot risks early, raise standards and make sure improvements happen.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and manage our core MSP platforms, including Datto (backup and device management), IT Glue (documentation), Nerdio (Microsoft Azure management) and Inforcer (Microsoft 365 configuration management). You’ll make sure they are set up correctly and run to agreed standards.
• Carry out technical changes to our platforms to meet valued customer requests, internal requests and changes that raise our standards.
• Support our vendor relationships, understanding changes to tools and platforms and assessing how they affect our services and valued customers.
• Work with practice leads, technical teams and change teams to plan, communicate and deliver improvements to customer standards.
• Work with our Internal IT team to keep our platforms secure, patched and up to date.
• Support the onboarding of new tools and platforms, from evaluation and integration through to documentation and handover to our operational teams.
• Lead on our Technical Standards for valued customers, finding opportunities to raise them. Examples include ageing hardware, servers that have reached end of life (EOL, meaning the supplier no longer supports them) and devices that have fallen outside their patching windows (the agreed times for installing security updates).
• Set consistent hardware and software specifications.
• Regularly assess customer environments against the Technical Standards, and report on compliance and drift (where an environment has moved away from the standard).
• Work with our sales teams to build the case for improvements and secure valued customers’ agreement to them.
• Manage enhancement projects from start to finish, such as retiring EOL platforms or solutions, making sure every valued customer is migrated and no one is left behind.
• Make hands-on technical changes to put higher customer standards in place.
• Maintain customer documentation, including network diagrams, system records and asset documentation.
• Spot technical risks before they become incidents, working with our problem, incident and technical teams to resolve them.
• Work with the service desk, engineering and ITIL teams to eliminate recurring problems. ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a widely used framework for managing IT services.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

Essential

• A strong technical background, ideally in an MSP environment.
• Experience administering MSP platforms such as Datto, IT Glue, Nerdio and Inforcer, or equivalent tools.
• Experience with documentation platforms such as IT Glue, Hudu or similar.
• Experience with scripting and automation, such as PowerShell (Microsoft’s scripting language) and Azure Automation.
• A solid understanding of the ITIL framework, including problem, change and asset management.
• Experience managing vendor relationships and licensing.
• A highly organised, detail-focused approach, particularly around documentation, asset records and tracking standards.
• Commercial awareness, with the ability to explain the business case for improvements to sales teams and valued customers.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to explain technical ideas to non-technical colleagues and valued customers.
• A highly collaborative approach, building strong working relationships across practices, change, service desk, engineering, sales and Internal IT.

Desirable

• Relevant Microsoft certifications, such as AZ-104, AZ-140, MS-102, AZ-500 or AZ-305.
• Vendor certifications in networking (Meraki, Cisco or Aruba) or in security platforms.
• Familiarity with service management principles.

Internal Job Level Reference: Specialist / Team Leader

Benefits

• Holiday Allowance - 24 days + bank holidays + birthday leave.
• Hybrid working options - performance depending.
• Enhanced maternity, paternity and adoption leave.
• Paid volunteering day * regular charity events.
• Wider company benefits across health, financial wellbeing, Pension etc.

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https://focusgroup.co.uk/information/privacy-notice/