Over the next week, the Customer Information Service team did the analysis required to estimate how long the changes would take to implement. Maria used the communication features of the service registry/repository to push out a message to the existing consumers about the pending change, and as she suspected, the biggest problem was going to be the home insurance system. Due to other priorities, the earliest they could even begin to make changes to their consumer would be nine months from now, potentially three months after the service needed to go live.

Craig met with Spencer and explained the problem to him. Spencer agreed to facilitate a decision-making session to explore the different options. Representatives from all of the existing consumers were there, along with Ramesh, Craig, and Maria.

Spencer started the meeting, "I'm sure all of you saw the notification from Maria last week that some changes are necessary to the Customer Information Service in order to support its usage by the annuity department. The problem that we face is that these changes will break the existing consumers of the service, and not all of you can make the changes to your systems in the currently proposed timeframe. Let's start out by listing all possible options, regardless of whether we all presently agree or disagree on their viability."

Craig started out, "Well, if we're listing all possible options, the first one is to update the service, and then get whatever push we need from management to get resources allocated to the consuming systems so they can make the changes in the time required."

Maria replied, "Come on Craig, you know that we can't just pull resources off projects that easily."

Jason, from the auto insurance department, added, "Aren't all of these changes a result of the annuity department? Why can't they just include modifying our applications within their project scope? They already have resources allocated to their project."

Paul, from the home insurance department, replied, "Do you really want some developers that have never seen your application before mucking around in your code? I know I don't."

Spencer said, "Let's remember, we're listing all options, regardless of whether we all know that the option won't fly. We want to make sure we've explored all of the options. I'm going to just leave this as one option, since we still wind up with the same result, regardless of where the resources come from. I'll capture the concerns about the option."

Paul, from the home insurance group, added, "Okay, here's another option. Why don't we leave the existing service in place, and simply have the annuity project write a new service that just they use. Then, none of us using the existing service would be impacted."

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