The Billion-Dollar Website

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...

Comments

Technical People

[TechyImmigrant]

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.

Re:Technical People

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Disclaimer: I'm a software engineering contractor that works on contracts for the federal government.

A solid majority of the contractors (the grunts doing the work) I've worked for/with in my career want to get the job done and do it well. Sales/marketing has a say at contract award and for mods, but during the actual work we rarely, if ever, hear from them or take guidance from them. The people commissioning the work (the government) usually have no clue what they want and, if presented with multiple solutions of varying risk and value, they still have no idea how to make a decision. The most altruistic contractor still, at the end of the day, needs to know loosely what the success criteria are...the government half the time has vehement disagreement about that among themselves and never comes to a unified decision.

The GAO's report is exemplar of what I've experienced...the government has no clue what requirements are or should be, how to execute, how to manage a contract. My contracts have routinely consisted of us contractors drafting requirements and handing them over to the government, only to have them ask us if they were sufficient and would accomplish the (loosely defined) task, then sign them, hand them off to contracts and they appear on our desk weeks down the line modified by contracts to be 1) more generic, or 2) incorrect. The government oversight at the program manager level is almost entirely a rubber stamping process.

Re:Technical People

[Anonymous Coward]

sales & marketing (not entirely unfair, they are typically huge scumbags)

I'm a web developer who works in the marketing department of a large organization. The people in my department are smart professionals who are tasked with keeping the organization on-message and professional in its communications with the outside world. This is an immensely difficult herding-cats kind of job because so many different departments and individuals are communicating with the public every day, and many of them do so in a way that unnecessarily casts the organization in a negative light. Sometimes it's just a matter of professionalism (poor grammar/spelling, rudeness, childishness), and other times it's because they're uninformed and telling people things that simply aren't true, which ends up confusing everyone.

Our department has a broader and deeper understanding of this organization than anyone else here, including the top leadership. We're the ones who have to continuously remind everyone else of the organization's guiding principles and priorities. And every time someone sends out yet another bulk email to 20,000 people in pink Comic Sans containing information that was no longer accurate as of 2007, we're the ones who have to beg them, yet again, to run their communications by us before they send them out. In fact, how about we just start sending your materials out for you? We'd be happy to. No, really, it would be our pleasure.

Contrary to common opinion, that's what a lot of marketing jobs are really like. Maybe some marketing people are scumbags, but not the ones I work with.

in other words

[ganjadude]

it was a giant clusterfuck like many people on both the left and right were claiming way before launch. the site was NOT ready for prime time (the back end still is not 100%) and it never should have been launched when it was.

also, water is wet

Re:in other words

[ganjadude]

congress tried to delay it before the government shutdown remember? obama would not budge, causing the government shutdown.

after the shutdown the site launched, and as expected obama changed his mind and delayed implementation anyway

so the reason for the shutdown was that the democrats did not want a delay and wouldnt budge. then when the site launches and makes them look bad, the implement the delay anyway... yet they still blame congress for the shutdown. and based on your comment it seems some americans are still dumb enough to believe it

F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

[tekrat]

Really, we want to complain about a website that cost a Billion? This is the United States Government, full of waste, fraud, no-bid contracts, and shit spread out out over every state so that ever senator and congressman has his slice of the taxpayer slush fund.

Witness the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, an aircraft nobody needs, trying to fill too many roles, and was supposed to save our armed services money by having one plane replace many planes.

Except it's billions over budget, still doesn't work (and might never work), and is expected to cost more than a Trillion dollars before all is said and done.

Meanwhile the aircraft is being usurped by drones, which are cheaper, easier to deploy, and may fill all the roles we'd ever need this crazy ass jet for. And we're trying so hard to make it stealthy, meanwhile as pointed out in a slashot article a few weeks back, long wave radar will find the plane just fine.

And yet the Pentagon continues to shovel more money into the project because -- guess what, there's no "plan B". This is the people we depend upon to strategize for us in times of war, and they have absolutley no fall-back plan. Brilliant.