Three weeks to a baseline that cannot hold 212 requirements
Northgate Mutual, a regional insurer, has six weeks to define requirements for a claims portal replacement, and the sponsor wants baseline sign-off in three weeks. A discovery workshop produced 212 candidate requirements from 14 stakeholder groups. A first pass shows 38 percent of them conflict, mostly between claims operations and the fraud unit. The delivery partner has capacity for roughly 60 requirements in the first release and has already booked a fixed start date. Two groups, the broker liaison team and the offshore processing centre, were not represented at the workshop and have not been contacted since. The programme manager wants a complete traceability matrix before any prioritisation work begins, and has asked you to confirm that the three-week sign-off is achievable.
1. How should you sequence prioritisation, conflict resolution and sign-off to hit the three-week baseline without excluding the two unrepresented groups?
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The sequencing request is itself the main risk. Building a full traceability matrix for 212 candidates before prioritising would consume most of the three weeks and would produce a map of items that will never be built.
Recommended sequence:
- Days 1-4: Triage and de-duplicate 212 candidates down to roughly 140-150 discrete items; classify each as in-scope, out-of-scope or decision-pending. Start traceability here, keyed to source, priority and decision - not to full downstream design links.
- Days 1-5, in parallel: Interview the broker liaison team and the offshore centre. Their input must land before ranking, not after. Late-arriving requirements are the most common cause of a baseline that collapses in week five.
- Days 5-10: Run conflict resolution only on the ~57 conflicting items, using criteria tied to claim cycle time, customer harm and regulatory exposure.
- Days 10-14: Rank the agreed set against the partner's 60-item capacity and produce two artefacts: a signed baseline of what is in release one, and an explicitly deferred backlog with named owners.
Sign-off is achievable, but only on a prioritised baseline, not on the full candidate set. Say that plainly to the sponsor now rather than in week three, and get the deferral list accepted as part of the same sign-off.
2. The fraud unit states its 19 requirements are non-negotiable; claims operations says the same about its 27. What structured approach do you use, and what do you escalate?
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Nineteen plus twenty-seven is 46 items, or roughly 77 percent of the 60-item release capacity before anything else is considered. That arithmetic is the lever: the conflict is not a disagreement to be smoothed over, it is a capacity decision that no amount of facilitation can absorb.
Approach:
- Convert positions into interests. Ask each group what outcome the requirement protects - fraud loss exposure, claim turnaround, rework - rather than which item they want. This usually reduces the 46 to a smaller set of genuinely distinct needs.
- Score jointly against agreed criteria. Use three or four criteria with published weights (regulatory exposure, customer harm, cycle-time impact, effort). Have both groups in the same session with a neutral chair, so the trade-off is made in public rather than arbitrated by you.
- Record dissent formally. Where agreement fails, capture the disagreement and its consequence in the decision log rather than resolving it silently.
Escalate to the sponsor, in writing, the trade-off itself - not the personalities: which requirements drop if both lists are honoured, or what the fixed start date costs if capacity is expanded. Bring two or three costed options. Do not escalate the conflict as a complaint; escalate it as a decision only the sponsor can make.