About this role
The Service Desk Portfolio Manager is a senior, hands-on operations leader responsible for the health, performance, and consistency of service desk operations across every Shield-acquired MSP. This role does not replace the local Service Desk Managers at each ShieldCo, it elevates them. The Portfolio Manager is the connective tissue between Shield’s operations leadership, our internal AI team, and the service desk teams already running each acquired MSP. The mission is simple, ensure every service board across the Shield portfolio is clean, well-managed, and continuously improving. That means consistent ticket hygiene, consolidated and trustworthy metrics, shared best practices across companies, and a strong feedback loop between the field and our AI and operations teams. This is a servant-leadership role, success is measured by how well the local managers and their teams perform, not by how visible the Portfolio Manager is. This is a occasional-travel required position. Some time may be spent on-site at ShieldCo locations, working shoulder-to-shoulder with local service desk teams, observing operations firsthand, coaching managers, and identifying what to scale across the portfolio. All travel is fully covered by the company. Portfolio-Wide Service Desk Oversight • Own the overall health and performance of service desk operations across every Shield-owned MSP, ensuring each service board is clean, accurate, and well-managed by its local Service Desk Manager. • Establish and enforce a consistent definition of “clean and well-managed” covering ticket hygiene, queue management, SLA adherence, time entry discipline, status accuracy, and documentation quality. • Conduct regular service board audits across ShieldCos and partner with local managers on remediation plans, tracking progress to closure. • Identify systemic risks, capacity issues, or staffing gaps across the portfolio and escalate with clear recommendations to operations leadership. Best Practices & Standardization • Develop, document, and roll out service desk best practices across the portfolio — including triage workflows, escalation paths, ticket templates, board structure, dispatch standards, and customer communication norms. • Run a recurring cross-company forum for ShieldCo Service Desk Managers to surface what’s working, share playbooks, and align on shared standards without erasing what makes each MSP effective locally. • Partner with operations to drive change management when new standards are introduced, ensuring local buy-in rather than top-down mandates. • Maintain a living portfolio playbook that captures the canonical “Shield way” of running a service desk. Metrics Consolidation & Reporting • Partner with operations and the data/AI team to define standard KPI definitions, ensuring apples-to-apples comparisons across companies that may use different PSA tools or reporting conventions. • Deliver clear, narrative-driven monthly and quarterly portfolio reporting to executive leadership, highlighting trends, outliers, and recommended actions. • Coach local managers on using the same metrics to run their own desks, not just to report upward. Partnership with Shield’s Internal AI Team • Act as the operational voice of the service desk in the design, piloting, and rollout of internal AI tools. including ticket triage, summarization, knowledge retrieval, and automation. • Identify high-value, repeatable workflows across the portfolio that are strong candidates for AI augmentation and prioritize them with the AI team based on impact and feasibility. • Coordinate pilots at selected ShieldCos, gather structured feedback from local managers and technicians, and own the rollout playbook for portfolio-wide adoption. • Ensure data quality on service boards is sufficient for AI tools to perform well, closing the loop between board hygiene and AI effectiveness. Coaching, Servant Leadership & Local Manager Development • Serve as a mentor, coach, and trusted partner to each ShieldCo’s Service Desk Manager by supporting them, removing obstacles, and helping them grow rather than managing them by directive. • Spend meaningful time on-site at each ShieldCo (approximately 15-25% travel), working alongside local teams to understand their reality before recommending changes. • Build trust at every level of the service desk from technicians to MSP leadership, so that improvements stick after the visit ends.