You've just joined Northcape Insurance as the Business Analyst on a project Maya Okafor has been waiting six months to start. Before you meet her, read what she's sent over.
Hi — welcome aboard.
You're starting on the project I've been waiting six months to get funded. We're a specialist insurer — about 400 people, all in the Manchester office plus a small remote team. Customers buy our policies online, on the phone, or through a broker. The problem starts after they've bought.
When a customer has an issue — a claim, a query, anything — they don't always know where to raise it. So they raise it everywhere. They phone us. They email. They open a case on the web portal. Each channel goes into a different system. Three separate cases get raised for the same person, the same problem.
Three agents pick them up. They all start from scratch. None of them know the other two are working on it. The customer gets three different replies, sometimes contradicting each other. Twice last quarter we had complaints to the Financial Ombudsman because of this. Both upheld.
We log it as "duplicate handling". Last month we counted 80+ duplicate cases a day across the team. The cost of a case is about £14 in agent time. We're wasting roughly £24,000 a month on duplicate work, not counting the customer trust we're burning.
The board has approved £180,000 to fix this. They want it live in 5 months. I want a single customer case view — one place where every agent can see every case the customer has open, regardless of which channel raised it. Build it, buy it, integrate something — I don't mind, but it has to work with our legacy core policy system because we can't rebuild that within this budget.
Your first job is to speak to my team: Tom Hewitt (Product Manager — he'll be your day-to-day partner), Sara Lin (Tech Lead — she's nervous about integration risk), Ben Carlisle (Senior Customer Service Agent — he's been here twelve years, knows where every workaround is), and Priya Roshan (Compliance Officer — anything we do has to satisfy her).
Get going. I'll see you on Monday for the kick-off.
Maya
Aurora isn't a tutorial. You drive the conversations: pick which stakeholder to meet, choose which lines of enquiry matter, and decide when to move on. Billie steps back unless you ask. She'll review what you covered at the end of each meeting.
You're expected to know how to interview a stakeholder. What you're practising here is the software-BA specifics: how to surface non-functional requirements without losing the room, how to handle build-vs-buy fairly, how to capture user stories that survive contact with a sprint, and how to make compliance a partner rather than an obstacle.