Service Desk Support Supervisor at National Jewish Health – Denver, Colorado

Position Summary
The Service Desk Support Supervisor provides leadership and operational oversight for the day-to-day performance of the IST Service Desk, ensuring consistent, responsive first-line support for clinical, research, administrative, and external portal users. This role serves as a hands-on technical leader and primary escalation point, driving first-contact resolution through coaching, standardized troubleshooting practices, and strong knowledge management. The Supervisor uses service desk metrics and trend analysis to improve quality, reduce recurring issues, and implement new tools and technologies (e.g., automation, self-service, remote support enhancements) that improve efficiency and the end-user experience. The position partners closely with the Technical Support Manager and other IST teams to align service desk execution with overall support strategy and service excellence goals. Serves as the IST Critical Incident Manager (Incident Commander) for high-impact outages and events, providing after-hours escaation leadership as needed, including carrying the incident response on-call phone and coordinating communications, triage, and restoration activities.

Essential Duties

1. Manage and develop the Service Desk team: recruit, train, mentor, and evaluate support staff while fostering a customer-focused, high-performance culture and ensuring adherence to organizational policies and standards.
2. Oversee daily operations and service quality: Ensure consistent, reliable support and prompt issue resolution for end-users. Coordinate and monitor all support activities, standardizing processes (including thorough ticket logging and tracking) to drive efficiency and operational excellence.
3. Maintain documentation and training resources: Develop and update clear technical support documentation, knowledge base articles, and training materials. Ensure these resources are current and easily accessible to the team to promote knowledge sharing and continuous learning.
4. Drive metrics and continuous improvement: Define and track key performance metrics (e.g. ticket volumes, response times, first-call resolution rates) to monitor service desk performance and workload. Analyze trends in these metrics to identify areas for improvement and implement corrective actions for enhanced service quality.
5. Manage scheduling and coverage: Organize staff schedules and ensure adequate coverage, so the service desk is appropriately staffed to meet user support demands. Adjust coverage for peak times or special situations to maintain timely support and fulfill service level expectations.
6. Lead incident resolution and escalation: Provide hands-on technical guidance during complex issues, with a strong emphasis on achieving first-call resolution for user problems. Act as the primary escalation point for high-priority or difficult incidents, collaborating with other IT teams to ensure timely, thorough resolution and proper follow-up with users.
7. Embrace new technologies and tools: Champion the adoption of modern support tools and technologies (e.g. remote troubleshooting software, automation platforms) to enhance team efficiency and improve the end-user experience. Leverage these solutions to enable the team to resolve more issues on first contact and continuously improve overall service delivery.
8. Acts as Critical Incident Manager (Incident Commander): Leads response for critical/high-impact incidents, including rapid triage, severity assessment, resource mobilization, escalation, and coordination across IST teams and vendors; ensures timely restoration and clear handoffs.
9. Owns incident communications and follow-through: Establishes and manages incident bridge calls/channels, provides status updates to stakeholders, maintains an incident timeline/record, and ensures completion of post-incident review activities (root cause, corrective actions, and knowledge/runbook updates).

Other Duties

1. Acts as backup for Service Desk staff as required.
2. Carries the incident response on-call phone on a scheduled rotation (or as assigned) and responds to critical incidents outside normal business hours, including nights/weekends/holidays as needed.

Competencies

1. Accountability: Accepts full responsibility for self and contribution as a team member; displays honesty and truthfulness; confronts problems quickly; displays a strong commitment to organizational success and inspires others to commit to goals; demonstrates a commitment to National Jewish Health.
2. Building Strategic Relationships: Identifying opportunities and taking action to build strategic relationships between one’s area and other areas, teams, departments, units, or organizations to help achieve business goals.
3. Building Trust: Interacting with others in a way that gives them confidence in one’s intentions and those of the organization.
4. Collaboration/Teamwork: Cooperates with others to accomplish common goals; works with employees within and across his/her department to achieve shared goals; treats others with dignity and respect and maintains a friendly demeanor; values the contributions of others.
5. Managing Conflict: Dealing effectively with others in an antagonistic situation; using appropriate interpersonal styles and methods to reduce tension or conflict between two or more people. Addresses conflicts by focusing on the issues at hand to develop effective solutions when disputes or disagreements occur; helps others resolve conflicts by providing impartial mediation when needed.
6. Impact and Influence: Using appropriate interpersonal styles and techniques to gain acceptance of ideas or plans; modifying one’s own behavior to accommodate tasks, situations, and individuals involved. Taking advantage of opportunities to make a difference and have an impact. When used well, the intended outcome of this competency is the creation of goodwill, trust, and respect while motivating people to want to follow you even when they don’t have to.
7. Informing and Communicating: Clearly conveying information and ideas through a variety of media to individuals or groups in a manner that engages the audience and helps them understand and retain the message.
8. Talent Management for Leaders: Clearly establishes and communicates expectations and accountabilities; monitors and evaluates performance; provides effective feedback and coaching; identifies development needs and helps employees address them to achieve optimal performance.

Supervisory or Managerial Responsibility
Supervises 3 – 5 employees

Travel
None

Core Values

1. Be available to work as scheduled and report to work on time.
2. Be willing to accept supervision and work well with others.
3. Be well groomed, appropriately for your role and wear ID Badge visibly.
4. Be in compliance with all departmental and institutional policies, the Employee Handbook, Code of Conduct and completes NetLearning by due date annually.
5. Promotes a workplace culture based on mutual respect and merit, where all individuals are treated fairly and provided with equal opportunity to contribute to the mission and goals of the institution.
6. Adheres to safe working practices and at all times follows all institutional and departmental safety policies and procedures.
7. Wears appropriate PPE as outlined by the infection control policies and procedures.
8. Demonstrates compliance with all state, federal and all other regulatory agency requirements.

Minimum Qualifications

1. Education: High school diploma or equivalency required. Bachelor degree in Computer Science, Business information systems or other related field preferred.
2. Work Experience: 4 years of recent IT service desk / technical support experience. 2 years leading or supervising a service desk/team (scheduling, coaching, performance management) preferred. Demonstrated success improving service desk outcomes (e.g., first-contact resolution, SLA performance, ticket quality, customer satisfaction). Hands-on experience using an ITSM/ticketing platform (incident/request workflows, documentation standards, knowledge base). Experience serving as a major/critical incident lead (Incident Commander) or leading outage response, coordinating cross-functional technical teams and communicating status to leadership and end users. (preferred)
3. Special Training, Certification or Licensure: ITIL 4 Foundation preferred. Microsoft (M365/Windows) role-aligned certifications preferred. CompTIA A+/Network+ and/or Security+ preferred.