Investing in Tufs

Summary:

Martin Drysdale was part of the project team and the CIO at Northern Insurance that brought the largest single investment in IT ever made by the company. Within the first two months, the Technical Underwriting Financial System (TUFS) was a complete disaster. TUFS was supposed to bring efficiency and growth opportunity for top-line management to grow but instead, the new system was just consuming endless amounts of money to fix the frequent errors. However, the system wasn't the only issue being brought about. Senior management was stuck in their old ways of doing things and wouldn't use the system like they were supposed to. Due to the major tank of the new system, Marin now had to face the CFO, Melissa Freeman, to try to defend himself. Melissa pointed out that they company dumped nearly 4 million dollars into the project and have yet to see savings like it had promised. Martin countered her jab: explaining how the underwriters won't use the system how it's supposed to be used, that there was a lack of effort from the underwriters in order to get the IT people filled in on what they needed and why they needed it, in addition to the depletion of critical functionalities that were forgone due to time restraints. Senior management then wanted to incorporate a training program for the system that wasn't in the original plan and would continue to add to the overall expanse of the project. Users of the system hadn't put the effort into using the system that was necessary for the saving to actually be realized and they expected results immediately. Melissa gives Drysdale until the end of the week to come up with why it isn't working the way it was intended, how to fix it, how to see/measure the benefits, and how to divide the budget.

1. A few different things went wrong with TUFS. One of the big issues is the fact that the underwriters did not participate much with the technicians when the planning was being done. They would not take the time...