Helping Stakeholders Make Investment Decisions with Collaborative Modeling

Who finances software development? How are the software investment decisions made? This is a story of how collaborative modeling helped increase management’s confidence in investment decisions. The story will show:

• How strategic leadership can benefit from a DDD-way of thinking.
• How to facilitate the decision making process involving the strategic leadership.
• How modelers can better understand the constraints the leadership is operating under.

The story is about helping senior management to make a substantial investment decision about their insurance software. Their monolithic legacy software combined a CRM, Billing, and Insurance system. The back-office users desperately needed improvement in insurance billing processes but the level of trust between the organization and the legacy system vendor was almost non-existing. However switching the vendors was deemed as an insurmountable challenge.

The team applied collaborative modelling to increase the management’s confidence in making the best investment decision given the constraints. After multiple models and hypotheses were suggested it turned out that investing in a separate insurance system not only aligned with domain and organization boundaries, it could also scale well financially for the organization.

The takeaways are:

• Real-world applications of a combo of Impact Mapping, Domain Storytelling, and Context Mapping techniques.
• An approach for facilitating investment decisions that can serve as a blueprint for your own organization.