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stoborrobots writes: The Government Accountability Office has investigated the cost blowouts associated with how the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) handled the Healthcare.gov project. It has released a 60-page report entitled Healthcare.gov: Ineffective Planning and Oversight Practices Underscore the Need for Improved Contract Management, with a 5 page summary. The key takeaway messages are:
- CMS undertook the development of Healthcare.gov and its related systems without effective planning or oversight practices...
- [The task] was a complex effort with compressed time frames. To be expedient, CMS issued task orders ... when key technical requirements were unknown...
- CMS identified major performance issues ... but took only limited steps to hold the contractor accountable.
- CMS awarded a new contract to another firm [and the new contract's cost has doubled] due to changes such as new requirements and other enhancements...
Non technical people are not competent to commission technical work from technical people.
If you (as a government or large company) don't have your own technical people on staff to oversee the process and comprehend or write the specs, you're doomed. The contractors know well how to milk a cash cow, simply by adhering to the specs written by people who don't understand how to write specs.
Sadly this is true, but it shouldn't be. Technical people should have the professionalism to analyse requirements and check that the requirements fit the purpose. Unfortunately the way of the world is that technical people would be quickly shuffled out of the way by sales and marketing if they started to reduce revenue by telling a customer what they really wanted instead of what the spec says.
The key takeaway from the report is that nobody will be personally held to blame for the incompetence (at best; corruption and nepotism at worst) of the process and end result.
No punishments or consequences, all around!
-Styopa
Don't hire people who have failed multiple projects in the past just because they were friends of the Obama campaign. At least that's what my finding determined.
the difference is that if its a private company doing it, we are not all paying for it. I dont care if a private company wastes a billion dollars, that has nothing to do with me and the rest of america. but when the government does it, it becomes an issue for all of us
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Technical people should have the professionalism to analyse requirements and check that the requirements fit the purpose.
Typically, they do. However you overlook one key component of this and then dump the blame completely on sales & marketing (not entirely unfair, they are typically huge scumbags). This requirements analysis and design phase costs more money than development. The cost for architecting software is far higher than simply building it. Clients typically do not want to pay for this and assume they know how to do it themselves. This is exactly what happened to healthcare.gov.
I have seen this happen with both state government and private corporation projects alike. I've never done a federal project, so I can't speak first hand about that, but I know people who have and they report the same is true when working for a federal agency.
So yes, part of the blame definitely should go to the sales & marketing bastards, but a very large chunk is on the client for not wanting to fork over the cash up front. This almost always results in spending even more cash later on to fix what people think are bugs but are really design failures which result from poor architecture and design processes.
PLEASE Mod Parent up! I've been working on large government funded systems (defense and commercial) for 35+ years, and in my view programs are screwed from the beginning by overly-aggressive schedules for the up-front work. When the incomplete/absent requirements/architecture/design results in coding, or more often test and integration delays, they'll find more money and time. By then, it's too late.
Back when we had explicit waterfall milestones (requirements review, preliminary design review, etc), we could tell at PDR a program would fail as a result of incomplete or even incorrect requirements & architecture.
Unfortunately, the adoption of "Agile" in these organizations has reinforced the culture of "We don't need no stinking requirements! We can draw an architecture on a whiteboard in an afternoon", resulting in systems where you really can't say anything intelligent about how long it will take to complete them, because you have no fscking idea what "complete" actually is.
And this -should not be a revelation-, at least to anyone who has read "Mythical Man-Month," which will be 40 years old next year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Thank God I'm getting ready to retire.
Pull your head out of your ass. Seriously. You've got the president going on record of saying he is not going to negotiate and actually claiming he's going to use executive order to bypass the limitations of power spelled out in the constitution during the state of the union, and you've got congress throwing up road blocks to do everything to basically try to stop Obama. I'm going to throw a shocker at you. You might want to sit down for this. I'm a conservative, and I'm happy with congress. The dems in the first two years when they had full control shot out of control. They did whatever they want with the justification of "well, we're the majority, we can do what we want". I'm sorry, that's not how the world works. If you had a 90% majority, then yes, but you don't. You have a 51% or 52% majority. When that's your majority, you need to consider what the other side wants, you don't get your way all the time.
What the dems pulled in the first two years of Obamas presidency set the stage for what's happening now. I voted in people to put the brakes on you guys, and they're doing exactly what I wanted them to. How about this, how about you sit back and say "hey, conservatives, okay, we need to live in this world together, how about we sit down and try to find a solution we can both tolerate". And please note that tolerate doesn't mean like. Remember, we have both parties right now refusing to negotiate. It's not one side or the other. The presidents own words can be quoted to attest to this.
And also note, I'm not claiming conservatives are blameless here either. But you just threw out a load of tripe putting all blame on one side, when both sides stink so bad they should all be thrown in the garbage.