Head of Operations & Continuous Improvement
Descrizione dell'offerta
Head of Operations & Continuous Improvement – Ardonagh Italia
Location: Milano, Italia
Role Purpose
Drive operational effectiveness and consistency across Ardonagh Italia by mapping current processes, simplifying and standardising them into Standard Operation Procedures (SOPs), building a robust Quality Assurance (QA) model, ensuring SOP currency, embedding structured training for new joiners, fostering a continuous improvement culture, delivering process efficiencies and cost reductions, maintaining visibility of daily workload and allocation, and owning SLAs for internal and external customers.
Key Responsibilities
1. Process Discovery & Standardisation (SOPs)
- Map all core processes across broking, policy administration, renewals, endorsements, claims handling, finance operations, customer contact, and compliance-linked workflows.
- Identify waste, simplify decision points, eliminate unnecessary handoffs, and standardise processes.
- Create detailed SOPs with purpose, scope, steps, templates, handoffs, controls, SLAs, RACI, and versioning.
- Establish and maintain a central SOP repository.
2. Quality Assurance (QA) Model
- Design and implement a formal QA framework (sampling plan, control checklists, scoring).
- Conduct sampling across calls, endorsements, quotes, claims files, and critical tasks.
- Lead Root Cause Analysis on defects and drive corrective action plans.
- Produce monthly QA dashboards and trend reports.
3. SOP Governance & Maintenance
- Implement SOP lifecycle governance, including review calendars and approval workflows.
- Maintain SOP change logs and ensure alignment with regulatory and carrier requirements.
4. Training & Onboarding
- Create a structured training curriculum aligned with SOPs.
- Build assessment tools, certification paths, and role-based learning plans.
- Ensure new joiners are fully trained and existing staff receive refreshers.
- Measure time-to-competence and training effectiveness.
5. Continuous Improvement Culture
- Introduce CI methodologies (Lean, Kaizen, RCA, visual management).
- Facilitate CI workshops and improvement sprints.
- Maintain CI pipeline and track benefits with Finance.
- Embed problem-solving capability in teams.
6. Cost, Streamlining & Automation
- Identify opportunities for cost reduction, process streamlining, and automation.
- Partner with Technology/Data to reduce rekeying, digitise forms, and eliminate bottlenecks.
- Build business cases and track financial benefits.
7. Workload Oversight & Allocation
- Maintain daily visibility of workloads, queues, SLAs, and resource utilisation.
- Create capacity models and ensure balanced allocation.
- Implement cross-training to enhance flexibility.
8. SLA Ownership
- Define SLAs for key services (call response, endorsement turnaround, claims FNOL, quote times).
- Monitor performance with dashboards.
- Lead SLA recovery plans and stakeholder communication.
Key Deliverables (12 Months)
- Full SOP library for all critical processes.
- QA framework and monthly dashboards.
- End-to-end training curriculum and onboarding path.
- CI pipeline with validated benefits.
- Workload management dashboards.
- SLA catalogue and service monitoring toolkit.
- SOP and QA governance playbook.
Skills, Experience & Behaviours
- 7–10+ years in Operational Excellence, ideally within insurance or insurance broking.
- Strong experience in process mapping, SOP design, QA frameworks, SLAs.
- Lean/Kaizen and RCA expertise.
- Data-driven decision making.
- Fluency in Italian and English.
- Lean Six Sigma Green/Black Belt is an advantage
- Team player
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills
- Excellent stakeholder management skills
- 5+ years as people manager
- Strong problem-solving capabilities
- Ability to influence without authority and work in a collaborative manner