Head of Operations

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)

2. Map all core processes across broking, policy administration, renewals, endorsements, claims handling, finance operations, customer contact, and compliance-linked workflows.

3. Identify waste, simplify decision points, eliminate unnecessary handoffs, and standardise processes.

4. Create detailed SOPs with purpose, scope, steps, templates, handoffs, controls, SLAs, RACI, and versioning.

5. Establish and maintain a central SOP repository.

6. Quality Assurance (QA) Model

7. Design and implement a formal QA framework (sampling plan, control checklists, scoring).

8. Conduct sampling across calls, endorsements, quotes, claims files, and critical tasks.

9. Lead Root Cause Analysis on defects and drive corrective action plans.

10. Produce monthly QA dashboards and trend reports.

11. SOP Governance & Maintenance

12. Implement SOP lifecycle governance, including review calendars and approval workflows.

13. Maintain SOP change logs and ensure alignment with regulatory and carrier requirements.

14. Training & Onboarding

15. Create a structured training curriculum aligned with SOPs.

16. Build assessment tools, certification paths, and role-based learning plans.

17. Ensure new joiners are fully trained and existing staff receive refreshers.

18. Measure time-to-competence and training effectiveness.

19. Continuous Improvement Culture

20. Introduce CI methodologies (Lean, Kaizen, RCA, visual management).

21. Facilitate CI workshops and improvement sprints.

22. Maintain CI pipeline and track benefits with Finance.

23. Embed problem-solving capability in teams.

24. Cost, Streamlining & Automation

25. Identify opportunities for cost reduction, process streamlining, and automation.

26. Partner with Technology/Data to reduce rekeying, digitise forms, and eliminate bottlenecks.

27. Build business cases and track financial benefits.

28. Workload Oversight & Allocation

29. Maintain daily visibility of workloads, queues, SLAs, and resource utilisation.

30. Create capacity models and ensure balanced allocation.

31. Implement cross-training to enhance flexibility.

32. SLA Ownership

33. Define SLAs for key services (call response, endorsement turnaround, claims FNOL, quote times).

34. Monitor performance with dashboards.

35. 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