Fixed-Price Regulatory Remediation with No BA Plan

The plan should cover the BA approach, stakeholder engagement, governance and decision rights, the requirements lifecycle from elicitation through sign-off, prioritization, traceability, change control, tools and repositories, and performance measures. For a regulatory program I would add a named legal/compliance reviewer and a rule-to-test traceability requirement as mandatory, not optional.

Tailoring matters more than completeness of template. Fixed price means scope must be baselined early and every change routed through the vendor's change-order clause, so I would define a requirements baseline at week 4 and a freeze at week 7. Fourteen weeks means rolling-wave planning and parallel work, not a single linear phase. I would define the deliverable set: a rule catalogue, current and future process models, a notification template matrix, requirement attributes, a traceability matrix, and a sign-off log.

I would also set a prioritization scheme up front: regulatory-mandatory, operational, enhancement. That scheme is what makes the sponsor's week-4 sign-off request achievable, because it allows staged sign-off of the regulatory core rather than pretending all six units can be fully specified in four weeks. Finally, I would add decision gates at weeks 4, 7, and 9, with explicit entry and exit criteria.

The week-1 schedule front-loads unit-level wants before the regulatory rule is understood. It also burns the one week when the billing SME is available, and it assumes six two-hour workshops can be absorbed and reviewed by a team with 1.5 BA FTE. That is a recipe for conflicting requirements and rework.

A better sequence:

1. Week 1: document analysis of the consent decree and current notices; process modeling of the notification lifecycle with legal and compliance; interviews with the billing SME before leave.
2. Weeks 1-2: build the rule catalogue and template inventory.
3. Weeks 2-3: run unit workshops focused on exceptions and variance against a common core, not open-ended wish lists.
4. Week 3-4: consolidate, verify against the decree, and stage sign-off.

Capture common requirements once and record variants by unit or jurisdiction. A context diagram would expose which units actually touch notification rules versus which only consume them. Stakeholder analysis also matters: legal and compliance are high influence and high interest; the offshore test team is high interest but low influence, so give them early visibility rather than waiting for a final package.

For the SME, the response is mostly avoidance and mitigation, not acceptance. Schedule the SME's sessions in weeks 1-2, record them, and have the SME name a backup delegate with authority to confirm rule details. Pair the SME with a billing analyst who can answer follow-up questions. Ask the sponsor to approve limited contact during leave for critical decisions, and define a decision-latency target so the team is not blocked. Every rule decision gets written down with its source.

For the offshore test dependency, the risk is that test design starts from incomplete or unstable requirements. Mitigate by releasing a draft rule catalogue and requirement set by week 5, co-developing test scenarios with the test lead, and giving the test team read access to the traceability matrix. Set a requirements freeze in week 7 for Release 1 scope, with post-freeze changes routed to a later release unless they are regulatory.

The escalation to the sponsor is specific: week-4 sign-off can cover the regulatory core only. Asking for all six units by week 4 would push the team to document guesses. I would present a staged sign-off plan with dates and the cost of the alternative, so the sponsor is choosing with evidence rather than being told no.