IIBA CBAP Exam - Topic 2 Question 123 Discussion

A large insurance company wants to buy a new claims processing system or upgrade one of its two existing system. Each year the claims department is given a $3.5 million budget to spend. Time is of the essence since there are tome regulatory charges that will be coming the following year that will require several features that currently neither one of the two claims System currently support.

There are eight stakeholders involved in this initiative. There are local to where the claim system is managed, while five are located across the country. The business analyst (BA) struggled to get all stakeholders to agree on the desired features but ultimately got agreement on ten identified key features for the new claims system. The BA was able to build a current state and future state process model which included all ten key features.

System a process 75% of the company's claims. It is 5 years old and the claim processors love it because it is easy to use. However, it must go offline for two hours each day. The code is very module so it does have flexibility to be modified. To upgrade system A to have all ten features it would cost $5 million. System A would be at capacity if it were to process all of the company's claims.

System B process 25% of the company's claims. It is an older mainframe system, but rarely goes offline. It could easily handle double the number of claims that system A processes. However, it has a lot of legacy code and would cost $6 million to upgrade.

Both systems have some of the desired key features. But neither system has all ten. The cost to buy a new system would be $7 million.

Below is the estimated cost for each feature in priority order.

If the budget for the initiative was firm, what is a feasible solution to make sure the project stays within budget?