HealthCare.gov: It almost worked

Re:HealthCare.gov: It almost worked by georgemcbay on Saturday January 04, 2014 @03:32PM (#7012778)

Based on my experience the bigger issue than money (though the two are related) could be too many shot-calling stakeholders. I'm sure HealthCare.gov had a much bigger budget than the Kentucky site but it also probably had far more people interested in putting their little "stamp" on it (absolutely regardless of how invisible that stamp is to people in the wider outside world who are just using the site) because the site was clearly going to be a "big deal". These little pet "stamps" often manifest themselves in conflicting requirements, power struggles that result in important technical decisions being altered haphazardly through the life of the project and dozens of other unfortunate ways.

The situation where you have a bunch of people trying to make a name for themselves within a project perceived to be very important without one strong decision maker keeping everyone in line is my number 1 "project smell" for detecting likely failure of a big project, and I'd be surprised if this wasn't a factor in the failure of the HealthCare.gov site.

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Re:HealthCare.gov: It almost worked by hga on Saturday January 04, 2014 @03:41PM (#7012823)

It's been reliably reported you are correct, shots were being called from the White House, on down through HHS to CMS, which was officially the general contractor/system integrator before they got "fired" in the 3rd week of October.

Whereas it's been reported that Kentuky's prime contractor, Deloitte, was absolutely ruthless about that sort of thing to achieve the goal of having something of value working by the deadline.

Oregon is also an even worse example of Healthcare.gov style mismanagement, with two dueling state government organizations, one of which did the usual trick of telling the contractor's employees to stop talking to the other unit....

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