Senior Stream Lead - Operational Readiness - Insurance - Freelance

Daily rate: 620€/690€

Context

This mission involves leading the end-to-end operational readiness for a major phase of a portfolio migration project within a Belgian life insurance context. The role ensures that Operations and all impacted internal functions can safely administer, service, control, and support the migrated Classic Life and remaining Unit-Linked portfolios from Day 1. The position requires converting migration, product, system, legal, risk, and finance changes into executable processes, trained and adequately staffed teams, controlled cutover activities, business-continuity arrangements, and a stable transition to Business as Usual, while protecting policyholders, brokers, regulatory compliance, and agreed service levels.

Missions

• Lead the operational readiness planning, governance, and execution for the migration waves.

• Chair weekly stream governance meetings and provide evidence-based status updates to cross-stream and Go/No-Go forums.

• Assess operational impacts of change requests and maintain decision traceability.

• Conduct end-to-end impact and gap assessments across Operations, Finance, IT, Legal/Compliance, Risk, Actuarial, and Customer Service.

• Translate stream outputs and historical data into executable processes and exception paths.

• Ensure procedures preserve policy terms, customer rights, audit trails, data protection, AML/sanctions, complaints handling, and legal declarations.

• Define KPIs, reconciliations, control points, maker-checker controls, and accountable process owners.

• Provide operational requirements and acceptance criteria for migration testing, including mass-data testing and exception handling.

• Mobilize SMEs for test support and dry runs; ensure defects and data-quality exceptions are resolved or mitigated.

• Design target organization, RACI, capacity model, skill matrix, access profiles, and segregation of duties.

• Assess workload and staffing impacts, including manual processing, transition peaks, and hyper care demand.

• Own training needs analysis, knowledge transfer, role-based curricula, user guides, and readiness attestations.

• Drive adoption and ensure teams understand the change, execution model, and support channels.

• Own the operational runbook and connect it to the integrated migration/cutover plan.

• Coordinate freeze windows, backlog management, TSA handoffs, staffing rosters, command-centre coverage, and Day-1 activation.

• Define fallback and manual workarounds for delays, instability, data defects, and unavailable calculations/documents.

• Lead hypercare, support incident triage and stabilization until agreed exit criteria and BAU acceptance are achieved.

• Escalate blockers with quantified customer, regulatory, financial, SLA, and schedule impacts and propose credible paths to resolution.

• Ensure operations align with approved product and onboarding outputs.

• Secure review and sign-off from COO/business owners and relevant Legal, Compliance, Risk, Finance, Actuarial, IT, and Data stakeholders.

• Report weekly RAG status on milestones, readiness indicators, risks, defects, training, staffing, and cutover.

• Track resource demand, availability, and budget implications; escalate capacity or skill gaps.

• Coordinate operational dependencies and knowledge transfer.

Tools & Environment

• Hybrid delivery methodologies

• MS Project

• Azure DevOps

• Excel

• Teams/SharePoint

• PPM/RAID tooling

Working Conditions

• Location: Belgium (bilingual business environment)

• Languages required: Dutch, French, English

• Seniority: Senior level

• Minimum 8 years of experience, including 3+ years leading operational readiness, transformation, or migration delivery in insurance/financial services