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 are 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 processes 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 system have some of the tem 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 System A is unanimously selected to be the system for upgrade but the technical lead says that System A will have to be taken offline for 3 months, what kind of strategy should the project team develop while system A is offline?