Case 5 - Acceptance, a duplicate-claim defect, and team members leaving Monday
Vantage Health's claims portal release 4.2 has completed system test: 210 of 214 planned test cases passed. The four failures are two severity 1 defects - duplicate claim submission when a retry follows a timeout, and incorrect rounding of co-payment to the nearest pound - and two severity 3 cosmetic issues. The client's operations director refuses to sign the acceptance certificate and also wants a disaster-recovery test that was in the quality plan but was never executed. The contract states that acceptance occurs on successful completion of system test, which the vendor argues has been met. The project has spent £1.15m of its £1.15m budget. Team members are booked onto another programme from Monday and the supplier's test environment is released on Friday. Go-live is in 10 days and 600 claims staff have been trained. The warranty gives 90 days of post-go-live fixes, severity 1 within 5 business days. The lessons-learned workshop has been cancelled twice, and the project manager's performance objective is tied to closing on the planned date.
1. Should the project manager push for formal acceptance now? Analyse the contract, the quality obligation and the manager's own incentive.
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Contract position: successful completion of system test is ambiguous, and 210 of 214 with two severity 1 failures will not read as successful to an auditor or a court. Arguing the letter of the contract here is technically defensible and commercially unwise.
Quality and safety position: a duplicate claim submission is a financial-control defect in a claims system. Accepting it knowingly shifts a known financial risk to the client and creates a dispute later, at a point when the project team has dispersed and leverage is gone. The co-payment rounding defect also has a financial impact that should be quantified, not simply classified as severity 1.
Incentive conflict: the project manager's objective is tied to closing on the planned date. That is a direct conflict with an honest acceptance recommendation and should be disclosed to the sponsor so the decision is not seen as self-serving.
Recommendation: pursue conditional or partial acceptance with a written punch list and exit criteria, not unconditional sign-off and not indefinite refusal. Options: fix both severity 1 defects before go-live if the 10 days allow; or go live with a documented compensating control and a dated fix commitment. Either way, the client, sponsor and quality owner must record the decision, and the project manager should not be the sole decision maker.
2. What closure actions must not be compressed, and how should the two severity 1 defects be handled?
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Closure activities that must not be skipped
- Verified deliverables against acceptance criteria, with the two severity 3 items formally accepted as known deviations.
- A defect log with owners, severity, target dates and the warranty terms attached; closure does not mean the defects disappear.
- The disaster-recovery test: either execute a reduced test now, or record a formal, signed deviation with a named risk owner and a completion date. Silently closing a quality plan item that was never executed is a plan nonconformance, not a paperwork gap.
- Operational handover: 600 trained users need a named support route for the first weeks, with escalation contacts and known-issue guidance.
- Contract closure: final invoices, warranty start date, licence and support terms.
- Archive of project records, and benefits handover to the operations owner.
Severity 1 defects
Duplicate submission: implement a technical control against retry duplication or a compensating daily reconciliation report, with a dated permanent fix and an owner. Rounding: quantify the financial exposure, state how many claims are affected, and decide whether retrospective correction is needed. Both are tracked daily until closed, not handed to a warranty queue and forgotten.
3. Design a lessons-learned process that will actually run given the dispersed team, and state two concrete outputs.
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Make it fit the constraint. A two-hour workshop in the last week will not happen; it has already been cancelled twice. Run a 45-minute structured session before Friday, with a written template for anyone absent, covering three questions: what was planned, what happened, and what we would change. Include the supplier and a representative of the operations team, because the most consequential lessons here involve the supplier's test environment and the client's acceptance criteria.
Keep it blameless and specific. 'Communication could be better' is useless; 'the DR test was in the quality plan but was never scheduled as a task, so no one owned it' is actionable.
Two concrete outputs
- A defect-escape analysis: duplicated claims and the unexecuted DR test traced to the quality plan not being decomposed into scheduled, owned tasks. Action: quality-plan items must appear in the schedule with owners and dates on the next release.
- A release-readiness gate template for the PMO: no acceptance certificate without DR test evidence and defined severity 1 and 2 exit criteria. Named owner and adoption date recorded.
Also record the cost of the acceptance dispute so future business cases price ambiguous acceptance criteria correctly.