Question: You will need to analyze the plan and make proper adjustments to meet the timeline requirements, as well as to ensure that resources are properly allocated.
You are employed in the corporate IT department of URCovered, Inc., which is one of the largest major auto insurance companies in North America. Based on a yearlong study, your company management has identified a mobile application as an opportunity to improve customer service in the area of claim management. There are both positive and negative arguments presented by management on how the mobile application can influence customer relationships. As a result, management decided to form a dedicated committee to study the problem further. The committee has two months to complete the study and will then return and present their results to management. Based on the additional study results, management believes they will be able to make a much more informed decision that is in the best interest of both the company and its customers.
As an IT business analyst, you are selected by management to perform the IT study of the mobile application. You will follow the IT company standard project process to complete the outputs supporting the initiation and discovery steps. The resulting output model will be presented to management for a GO/NO GO decision. In the event there is a GO decision, the model output will be used as input to the remaining project steps of construction, verification and validation, and closeout. In the event of a NO GO, the resulting output documents will be archived accordingly and the project will move to closeout.
The following information was noted during management meetings and should be able to get you started:
In the monthly management meeting, one of the agenda items was to discuss the claims management system. This system is over 5 years old now and it does a fantastic job of managing customer claims internally for case managers. The case manager is responsible for the entire workflow beginning with the initial claim request and ending with the final customer follow-ups after a claim has been completed. The system is well integrated with accessibility via the web for all people involved with the claim, including car repair shops, auto body, paint shops, etc. The web application screens are user friendly however they do require a computer to access. Based on the case manager contact with customers as well as other survey based feedback channels, it was determined that customers would prefer to use a mobile application because they don't really use a computer any more. They found that they called their case manager instead of logging into the web application.
As the discussion continued regarding the mobile application, the managers believed that it was a great idea. The discussion began to dive further into details and some managers quickly recognized that maybe a mobile application would not be good for the customer relationship. The contact with the case manager and customer was more personal. The mobile application may cause a customer to feel disconnected and lose that personal connection. Another concern was ensuring that the information provided was accurate. One claim manager provided the following example. Consider that the customer checks on the status of a claim to find that it is in a pending status. This internal status is meaningful and positive to the case manager who can properly communicate the interpretation of the pending status, whereas the customer becomes stressed because they interpret this status as meaning their claim is not approved.
The management team agreed that they all were in favor of a mobile application. However, they wanted to perform further analysis to ensure that the application could keep the personal connection with the customer.
The information below outlines the high-level requirements and scope of the mobile application as agreed on by the management team:
• The mobile application is intended to provide customers an alternate communication option with their case manager.
• It is to be an extension of the current process and not a replacement of the current process.
• It will need to represent information in the same manner that a case manager would. For example, internal system status will need a mapped customer status.
• It should have options for alerting the customer to new information.
• It should have two-way communication for the case manager and customer, for example, a message area that each can write/read/respond to.
• It should have the case manager's online business card with an option to immediately dial the case manager from the mobile application.
• It will need the same security IDs and levels as already exist in the web application.
• It was decided that this mobile application would first be designed for an Apple iPhone/iPad platform.
• It will integrate with the existing claim management system database.
• It is to be an actual iOS application versus a mobile version of the current claims management website.
• The study is not expected to solve all the IT infrastructure details but it is expected to focus on the end user experience.