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

[Chrisq]

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.

Re:Technical People

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Technical People

[BringsApples]

Dunno man, I feel what you're saying, and agree. However, a quick look at the site will prove that there's more than just milking a cash-cow going on here. If you check out this page for instance, you'll find that there isn't any information regarding anything at all, just a bunch of random Latin.

Google translate thinks it's English, but it's Latin. Here's what I found it to mean:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet pretty easy. Unfortunately, lots of orange gear, but every time a commercial truck.
Gets certain warm-up is a lot of life from which the film's style is. I'd now look at a wide range of law enforcement.
Residents drink
Currently, my, lump in the throat, it's the sauce.
To learn how Warren financing, but the emotional temperature, the element of surprise.
Tomorrow protein recipes. He was smart, maybe he was always in need of a lake in Japan.
No matter who or how inexpensive and easy-to-time only. In order that on Monday, but the laughter of a wide range of airline, travel agency employee is the ugly, and not before or it's just the likelihood of the company. In fact, it has been said it is in the interests of the quiver.
Unfortunately, the keyboard of the United States in the very soft impact.

So it looks like this page, a page that many would go to looking for advice on what to do since no doctors take medicaid now (Many are no longer accepting obamacare at all), is left blank (feeling that perhaps what's there is some default junk included with whatever web-hosting software they use). Seems like someone would have done something to fix this by now.

Re:Technical People

[david.emery]

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.

Re:Technical People

[Anonymous Coward]

Note however there is one very important point missed in all the rhetoric... That of changing specification coupled with muddied/stratified change management. This issue sits squarely on CMSs shoulders and is absolute poison to any IT project of any significance...

Re:Technical People

[Metabolife]

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Bankers without oversight lie and steal. CEOs without oversight lie and steal. Techs without oversight lie and steal. Not everyone will follow this path, but you will always have a few.

Re:Technical People

[LordLucless]

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.

Most I know do. The problem is that they're not sufficiently expert in the domain (in this case, health care) to determine the purpose, and the purpose the client gave them is wrong.

Specs aren't just some bureaucratic hoop that needs to be jumped through to get a developer to sit down and code, and they're not something a developer can just wing, and get right anyway, because they already knew what they were and were just being anal about getting you to write down.

They are important, and if they're not done properly, the dev will likely spend a lot of time doing the wrong thing correctly, and you will be billed for it.

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

[oneandoneis2]

"Lorem ipsum" is industry standard "filler" text for incomplete web pages - typically used to show clients what a page will look like when it has some useful content.

Not that it isn't appalling that it's appearing on a page in production, but it isn't "random Latin" - there are even browser extensions to make it easy to C&P for you.

Re: Technical People

[AvitarX]

By obama care do you mean private health plans ?

Re:Technical People

[trout007]

Part of the problem is because of how contracts are awarded. A business is allowed to use their brains and not go with the low bidder because they obviously don't understand the job or have a history of being a pain to work with. The government is not allowed to do this. They have to write a perfect requirements document and put out an open request for bids. If anything in the requirements document is not perfect the contractor is legally allowed to mess it up on purpose and charge for fixing it. This type of behavior doesn't happen as often in the private sector because those firms get a bad reputation and go out of business.

Re:Technical People

[Wycliffe]

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.

I have a friend who bids government contracts (highways,schools,sewage plants,etc).
He says that there is no advantage to fix the contract before the bid because then all the other bidders get those same cost savings.
Also, you also can't have multiple people bidding and making suggestions on what to change as then you have no way of comparing the resulting bids.
Likewise, after the bid, you can tell them how to fix it but then you're fighting an uphill battle because you're basically trying to change the contract at that point.
So it isn't really about professionalism and taking the higher ground but more an effect of the entire bidding process.

Re:Technical People

[sunking2]

Oh please. It's just another example of fleecing a government contract. This one being a no brainer to do on given it's importance.

Re:Technical People

[The Grassy Knoll]

"Lorem ipsum" is industry standard "filler" text for incomplete web pages

But it never occurred to me to pop it into Google Translate! Many thanks, BringsApples!

Re:Technical People

[JWW]

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.

Exactly. But what I love most about the study is how this ineffective oversight will be solved by ..... MORE oversight!

Re:Technical People

[bitingduck]

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.

This is a part of why the government created Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs). DOE created them during WWII because they saw a need for an organization that had more flexibility than the government (they're all privately operated) but would act as an expert exclusively on behalf of the gov't. They get their money entirely from a single agency and most do a combination of direct work ("we'll do it in house") to main expertise and procurement ("we'll spread it around"), recognizing that to be good buyers they need to have a good deal of internal expertise. Most of the FFRDCs are run by DOE (they started as the weapons labs and science centers to develop knowledge of elementary physics for weapons research), but many agencies have them. It's probably time to create one for government software development, or assign is as a role to a few existing ones.

Re:Technical People

[I'm New Around Here]

I anonymously mod you up +5.

Wait. How'd you do that?

Re:Technical People

[I'm New Around Here]

Thank God I'm getting ready to retire.

Stock up on essentials now. Or even sell everything and retire to a warm island. It's only getting worse here.

Re:Technical People

[Cludge]

This is a nice way of saying that the governing bodies of many large organizations are staffed by idiots. I recently did technical work in Asia, as a contractor for a well-known company with a global presence. They've been in business for more than 100 years. They have a beautiful website, filled with inspiring photos and pages and pages of uplifting copy, talking about their important altruistic mission. So I naively thought they would be experts at their core work. What I discovered was a company run by greed-driven overlords at the top, and clueless staff at almost every other level. Technical proficiency was clearly not an valued commodity -- it was all about maintaining the facade of being the good guys, saving the world. I was shocked by how much they relied on boiler plate to write nearly every document, and the serious lack of technical skills necessary to do their job. The few technically competent people were marginalized, while the loud, pushy "A" types in charge of daily operations mainly worked at protecting their own status in the company. What was truly sad to see: how the recent graduates, hired to do the core tasks, had their enthusiasm and can-do attitudes suck out of them by the continuous stream of obfuscation, redirection, and soul crushing obliviousness. I guess some things never change.

Re:Technical People

[I'm New Around Here]

Page has been taken down.

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.

Re:Technical People

[Anonymous Coward]

> The cost for architecting software is far higher than simply building it

Say what? This makes no sense. How is nobody else commenting on how backwards this is? Using colorful language "simply building it" to characterize a falsehood, doesn't make it true. Building out a complex system is the only way to find undocumented or unknown conditions and redesign interfaces to deal with that. You don't usually "rearchitect" the whole project because 1 resource has a snag, but investigation and rework NEVER overruns the cost of implementation. It IS the cost of implementation.

Re:Technical People

[perpenso]

Not that it isn't appalling that it's appearing on a page in production ...

Well the site is not complete, its still under heavy development. Remember that the only part that got "finished" was the sign-up portion.

Re:Technical People

[poached]

Agile is not about not needing requirements. It's about the fact that any complex project will have requirement changes and the project and the people on the project need to deal with those changes quickly. It's like that saying, "the only constant in the world is change." Rather than avoiding change and try to spec out everything in advance (which cannot be done), embrace it and deal with it so it minimizes disruption.

There are meetings to gather requirements, but those meetings are two-way; you also present and let clients play around with whatever you have and gather feedback and incorporating those feedback into the next iteration. By the time you deliver the product, there shouldn't be any surprises to the client about how the product behaves. Both parties are happy with their experience.

Re:Technical People

[david.emery]

Kool-aid...

Re:Technical People

[Dr. Evil]

Last place I work was run by millenial developers.

They told me "the code is the documentation".

I asked them "ok, what are the requirements?"

They gave me a blank stare.

"How can we write code until we know what we're trying to accomplish?"

"You want to write a 300 page Word doc that nobody's going to read?"

I was at a loss... "no, but a doodle on a napkin might be enough. I need *something*"

Possibly the most educational 6 months of my life. Didn't accomplish much, everything got thrown out for not fulfilling the non-existent requirements. Despite the maddness, the people were nice. It took a long time for me to really understand what was going on. In the end, I was glad to leave the gig. The company was made of three one-man developer shows who didn't understand that the stuff in the heads of three developers were separate and unrelated requirements documents for separate projects. It was impossible to contribute to any project without reading the mind of the developer.

They measured their own success in achiving goals after they were accomplished. Which meant that the stars shone, but contributors rarely had successes.

Re:Technical People

[Bartles]

You do realize that Cynthia McKinney was the Green Party nominee in 2008, right? For me, it would take a lot for them to right that wrong and get my consideration again.

Re:Technical People

[I'm New Around Here]

My proposition isn't about getting what you want, directly. It is about getting the current system of Dem/Rep out of shared power. For that, you need every fringe and near fringe voter to choose against the current system. Take the 20% far left, and the 20% far right, and make them believe they can change Washington politics, and we will see a change in Federal control.

The two groups aren't aligned on many things, but the issues common to both are privacy rights and government spying, our latest wars, and bailing out big business. Don't make issues of social aspects, because that drops half the voting pool you are looking for. Just get in a new system to break the back of current corruption and cronyism (again, from both Dems and Reps) and let America see what they have lost over the last several decades.

Re:Technical People

[TechyImmigrant]

> The cost for architecting software is far higher than simply building it

Say what? This makes no sense. How is nobody else commenting on how backwards this is? Using colorful language "simply building it" to characterize a falsehood, doesn't make it true. Building out a complex system is the only way to find undocumented or unknown conditions and redesign interfaces to deal with that. You don't usually "rearchitect" the whole project because 1 resource has a snag, but investigation and rework NEVER overruns the cost of implementation. It IS the cost of implementation.

Yet it is true.
My single data point is and average of ~3 years of thinking about how to build a system to ~6 months of building. It has never been a mistake to think through the whole thing from as many angles as you can and not commit to build until you know everything fits. I could spend 6 months thinking, 6 months building and 3 years fixing and patching, but no one is happy with that.

Re:Technical People

[Bartles]

Yeah, that's all great. But they nominated Cynthia McKinney. If it had been David Duke would you be saying the same thing? Ultimately, the candidate matters.

Re:Technical People

[TechyImmigrant]

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Re:Technical People

[tomhath]

It depends on what you mean by "specs". Ideally the organization commissioning the work has subject matter experts who know what they want, but don't try to dictate how to do it. They should have enough technical people on staff or on contract to review the proposed implementation.

The real problems start when either non-technical people try to do the technical design, or technical people try to guess what the application should do. In the case of healthcare.gov, nobody really know what they wanted. CMS had no experience running an insurance exchange.

Re: Technical People

[TechyImmigrant]

>They mean government meddling in healthcare.
How does that work? How does a doctor reject an insured patient because 'government meddling'? Do people have special 'government meddling' marks on their insurance cards so they can be singled out? I think not.

In programming this would be called a type mismatch. In the normal world it's called something much more offensive.

Re:Technical People

[I'm New Around Here]

I'd say it unless they nominate Hillary Clinton in 2016. I don't care what the candidate is like personally. I just want to break the deadlock we are living under right now.

Besides, it's not like they are going to be able to do anything anyway. Congress certainly isn't going to change enough in one election allow it. But it will eventually change if my split ticket won in 2016. Basically, long term, it is the only hope I see for the country, and it's only a glimmer at that.

Re: Technical People

[AvitarX]

Like preventing me from doing medical work because I don't have training?

Doctors absolutly want government to meddle in healthcare, it allows them to charge more for things we all could do.

Re:Technical People

[luis_a_espinal]

Agile is not about not needing requirements. It's about the fact that any complex project will have requirement changes and the project and the people on the project need to deal with those changes quickly. It's like that saying, "the only constant in the world is change." Rather than avoiding change and try to spec out everything in advance (which cannot be done), embrace it and deal with it so it minimizes disruption.

There are meetings to gather requirements, but those meetings are two-way; you also present and let clients play around with whatever you have and gather feedback and incorporating those feedback into the next iteration. By the time you deliver the product, there shouldn't be any surprises to the client about how the product behaves. Both parties are happy with their experience.

I know that. You know that. A lot of people (specially people in power do not), which is what the OP was referring to.

Re:Technical People

[BlueStrat]

> since no doctors take medicaid now (Many are no longer accepting obamacare at all),

That makes no sense whatsoever. Medicare is not Obamacare (or the Affordable Care Act to name it properly). Medicare predates the ACA by many years. No one goes to the doctor with an obamacare. They go to the doctor with an insurance plan. The doctor has no way to differentiate that plan obtained through an ACA exchange from any other plan obtained through an employer sponsored plan. They look the same to the doctor. You don't get a card that says Obamacare on it. Mine says Bluecross/Blueshield.

That's for people like you who can afford to purchase insurance. Guess what card poor people and the working-poor whose employer has dropped providing health insurance and opts to pay the penalty instead carry under ACA/Obamacare?

That's right, Medicare/Medicaid.

I'll give you three guesses on what type of new patients GP doctors (the ones that haven't yet joined the increasing numbers of doctors who are retiring early to avoid this train wreck) are increasingly refusing to take on.

If you want to see how well health care is going to be run in the US under the ACA, just look at the VA and the recent news stories concerning it.

Strat

Re:Technical People

[Cyberdyne]

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.

All too true, sadly. Tendering processes seem to exacerbate this: when a government control freak puts out a document announcing that the government is really determined to buy a chocolate teapot, whatever the price, the bidder saying "here's a stainless steel teapot which will do the job for $5" gets dumped, while the one saying "we'll stick bars of premium Swiss chocolate together with chewing gum for $1m" gets handed the million - then another million to patch the chocolate teapot with cement to make it hold hot liquids. Then it turns out they were actually needing a milkshake dispenser in the first place but didn't understand anything about beverages, so they have to start again from scratch, $2m down.

One large government contract I was involved in stipulated in minute detail exactly what error message had to appear when the service was offline. There was no SLA, however, not even an incentive in the contract to improve it! (This was the result of the previous project for that department having been a high-profile failure, with servers overwhelmed by the load. The bureaucrats responded to that with "next time, let's make sure it can show an error when busy!" rather than requiring scalability or load tests.) On the bright side, the winning bidder had the integrity to make sure it didn't fall apart anyway.

Re:Technical People

[ThatAblaze]

Unless the project is R&D or entirely new and unknown architecture should be the larger job. Building without planning really only works when you aren't working with a team.. so it hardly ever works in a corporate or government environment.. as demonstrated by the article.

Re:Technical People

[TechyImmigrant]

You are continuing to conflate Medicaid with the ACA. Is your problem with Medicaid or the ACA?

> just look at the VA and the recent news stories concerning it.

Unlike you, I've recently had cause to spend a lot of time at a VA hospital. Unlike other hospitals, it doesn't fund itself by employing people to spend all day on the phone with insurance companies. The issues you pretend to understand around Medicaid do not have any relevance to how the VA hospitals are run. Trying to suggest that the VA hospitals are a model for how the ACA will work suggests you are not honest.

Re:Technical People

[BlueStrat]

You are continuing to conflate Medicaid with the ACA

And you seem to be denying that Medicaid is part and parcel of ACA and where those who can't afford the higher costs of ACA insurers end up.

The issues you pretend to understand around Medicaid do not have any relevance to how the VA hospitals are run

They are both ran by government bureaucracies. Government bureaucracies are infamous for waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption. They are no exception and neither is the ACA.

Trying to suggest that the VA hospitals are a model for how the ACA will work suggests you are not honest.

Trying to suggest I am not honest because I see and recognize universal patterns of bad behaviors and poor results from government programs suggests you are defending a political partisan ideology rather than trying to solve real problems.

Strat

Re: Technical People

[etienno5775]

The "adoption of agile" has nothing to do with this failure. On the contrary. The project was absolutly not agile. It was a bad waterfall project, date-driven, with a complete failure in requierements management, and lack of architectural ownership. There's no way a more waterfall approach would have saved this project. It would have killed it earlier. This is non-sense. A fixed date driven project, with a fixed + growing set of requirements is a nightmare to manage. It will necessary lead to much higher cost than planned. The audit report is totally wrong to state that a cost-plus-fixed-fee was a bad deal for CMS. For what I read, it seems like an excellent deal for CMS. A cost-plus-fixed-fee is the cheapest way to build a product while you do not have the final requirements. The real problem I see while reading the audit report, is that CMS was totally incompetent to manage and communicate with their contractors (CGI and Accenture), and totally incompetent in managing the requierement portfolio backlog. A fix-cost contract would have cost a lot more. A more agile approach, a portfolio management structure like in SAFe for instance, continuous integration, continuous delivery and test, would have helped a lot.

Re: Technical People

[I'm New Around Here]

It's called Medicaid and Medicare.

Many doctors no longer accept patients covered by such programs.

Re: Technical People

[david.emery]

I don't know if anyone associated with this project adopted anything they called "agile" or not. What I was saying was that I have zero confidence in "agile" as I've seen it either defined or applied, for products that are (a) large, (b) complex and/or (c) have substantial infrastructure (versus user-facing) functionality. This project had at least (a) large, and probably (c) substantial infrastructure requirements (that might have been solvable by judicious selection of the right commercial products.)

It should be a feature that a waterfall project could be seen to fail early, but for the PM whose career is built on continuing the project past his tenure, there's no advantage to her/him to fail quickly.

Re: Technical People

[etienno5775]

You have a good point on your idea of "failing early waterfall". But this is an utopia. Waterfall project will never have the feature to fail early, it is not part of their DNA. With the lack of transparency brought by the tunnel effect, Death March project will always happen in Waterfall.

My two cents.

a) Large: This is were you might have a point. When your project is large - large because of functional design issues, or large because it needs to be large? - collaboration might less effective without a sort of strong portfolio governance (agile or not). All project is difficult when *big teams that never worked together before*. But on the other hand, does Waterfall have greater success on ad-hoc large teams? I would tend to say that we might have the same problem. I would hypothesis that most large projects fail, less because of the chosen methodology, but for cultural problems, requirement managements, lack of purpose that limits the collaboration and effectiveness.

b) Complexity: One great advantage with Agility is the facility to deal with complexe problems. By shorting the length of deliverables, working intensively on collaboration (small and large), and testing value early, agility can address complex and unknown problems. Agility is about "adaptation to change" needed in complex situation. By implementing fast feedback, and optimized transparency in the agile methodology, the Fail Often, Fail Fast, Fail Cheap principles are embedded in Agile.

c) Infrastructure: No project will succeed without its infrastructure, and the capacity for the development teams to deliver, integrate and test their components rapidly. Agility states that you need to test everything (the business value) as soon as possible, iso-production systems, in a cadence way. Waterfall states that you need to plan to have your machines, your testing machine on the right order. I don't see how Agility would create a insurmountable challenge in managing infrastructure.

Re:Technical People

[trout007]

And if you don't go with the low bidder they can sue and drag out the procurement process. Again this doesn't happen in business.

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

Re:in other words

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:in other words

[Pascoea]

This whole argument revolves around Obamacare. You can argue its effectiveness till you are blue in the face and never get anywhere. You would be more successful arguing about religion or programming languages.

It boils down to one simple question that you have to get consensus on before you can move forward: Is healthcare a basic human right? I specifically left out words like "affordable" and "quality" because they dilute the conversation. It is simple, if I am sick am I entitled to get better? I would love to hear somebody answer "no" to that question, and offer a reasonable justification without using any terms related to affordability, money, insurance companies, or quality of care.

So, assuming you are all with me on the basic right to healthcare, we dive into the money part of it. Which is what all of the bitching is actually about. Everybody has the right to get well, who pays for it? The current solution is that everybody has to buy health "insurance". If you can't "afford" it the gov't will help you pay for it. This is where the current administration looses me. And since this is Slashdot, why not use a car analogy. The gov't assumes that at some point, everybody in the country is going to have to get from one place to another, so they make it mandatory that everybody must own a vehicle. If you can't afford a car, they will help you buy one. Some people will drive their car every day, some cars will sit in the garage all day every day. Yes, in theory, everybody will be able to get where they need to go when they need to go there. But what about all of the money wasted on the cars sitting around not being driven, where has that gone? You can bet the guys at GM, Ford, Toyota, et al. are happier than pigs in shit. They just broke every sales record they have ever set. That is my frustration with Obamacare, the gov't just handed truck fulls of money to the insurance companies (who have been continuously turning record profits.)

Re:in other words

[ganjadude]

what i mean is that what the republicans were after was a delay to the individual mandate due to the fact that the system was not ready.

obama and the senate dems said too bad we are going to implement it there will be no delay, and thats the end of that.

so in the end the government shut down, obama went out of his way to make it as hard as possible (closing open air memorials like the WW2 memorial for example) and when the government opened back up, the website launched and what does obama do? the exact thing that the republicans asked to happen to avoid the shutdown.

Re:in other words

[Anonymous Coward]

+5, Insightful. What we wanted was health care what we got was health insurance. Not the same thing.

Re:in other words

[ganjadude]

that might be the end goal, but that was not the goal concerning the govt shutdown. try and keep up my statements reflect reality much better than anything the media is pushing

Re: in other words

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Healthcare is not a right. We all will die eventually and making 'unconditional staying alive' into a "right" denies that reality.

A better way of looking at it is: "how much should somebody be allowed to demand from others for the continued opportunity to stay alive."

Why should healthcare workers essentially be enslaved to pander to someone else's delusions of immortality?

It's a complex matter that doesn't lend itself well to bumper sticker slogans.

Re:in other words

[I'm New Around Here]

It boils down to one simple question that you have to get consensus on before you can move forward: Is healthcare a basic human right? I specifically left out words like "affordable" and "quality" because they dilute the conversation. It is simple, if I am sick am I entitled to get better? I would love to hear somebody answer "no" to that question, and offer a reasonable justification without using any terms related to affordability, money, insurance companies, or quality of care.

I'll answer "no" to that question, without using any of the gotcha phrases you are hoping for. I will do so with a thought experiment I entertain myself with when I'm bored. I use variations for different situations, so I'll make one for your 'right to healthcare' scenario.

If you have a small population of people, say 500, and the rest of humanity disappears, what 'rights' do they have? Does one person have the right to live in peace, without one of the other 499 attacking him/her? There is no such right in the natural world where lions attack zebras or hornets attack bears. Do people have that right? Personally I don't believe they do, because that right has to come from something outside of the group of people. Maybe something 'higher than' the people. Yes, religion is basically codified human rights. Without that system, I have no more rights than an antelope or humpback whale. Within that system, I may not have the same rights as others, but most religions cover the fundamental ones of survival. Coincidentally, I am not religious, but I am glad most people are.

So, what rights does a 1-in-500 person have? If they are members of the same US Midwest church (that was saved when the rest of humanity disappeared), they have the rights their religion stipulates. They have no 'Constitutional rights' because the whole government is gone, including enforcement of the Constitution. If they are 500 random people chosen from all the cultures of the world, they will have to decide for themselves what basic rights each person has. And I can guarantee there will not be agreement on even the basics, if they even understand each other enough to argue intelligently, rather than gesticulating and shoving each other.

But for the sake of your question, let's assume the people agree than they have the rights of: not being attacked, non-violent personal belief/religion, privacy, speech, self-defense, healthcare. How are these rights enforced? Most of them are enforced by not attacking someone. Let a person live in peace, let them pray, let them talk, and you've already covered the first four. The fifth is enforced by not punishing someone for fighting off another person who chose to ignore the first right listed.

So that leaves us with the final right the group chose to include. How is 'healthcare' enforced? If there are no doctors/nurses/healers/whatever in the group, they have a real quandary. They have to train someone on healthcare, so that person can then provide it. But how do they train someone in a field none of them know to begin with? They have to have some of the group work towards learning what they know their doctors knew. That's not going to go very well, and will take a long time doing it.

Now let's say that one of the 500 is a general practitioner, and has the knowledge needed to treat common conditions the group will face. What if he doesn't want to do so? If he decides he wants to be alone to contemplate his own beliefs for a while, in light of the disappearance of the rest of humanity, does the rest of the group have the right to force him to be their doctor? If he wants to move away, start a small farm to raise vegetables and forget all his medical knowledge, does the group have the right to force him to train someone as an apprentice/replacement? If he will agree to see some people but not others, for whatever reason, do the others have a right to force him to see them as well? Do they have the right to follow him around begging for his attention? Do they have the right t

Re:in other words

[sillybilly]

Obamacare has two sides to it. The yin-yang sides. On the one hand it finally allows low income families, and elderly, to purchase badly needed healthcare, so they don't get bankrupt every time they land in the hospital, or the whole family does not get bankrupt when one of the 10 children gets sick. However, by not doing what the law says, young and healthy people rebelling, and not buying health insurance, they can do OK too. Which is what the whole law was supposed to go after, for the insurance companies. Insurance companies are not interested in the sickly elderly, or huge families who can't afford anything because they are huge families, and somebody inevitably gets sick all the time, because they cannot make money on them, they drag them down from the profit into the loss territory, to bleed red ink and go belly up as an insurance business. What the insurance companies and Obamacare are after is the single, healthy youth, who are profit cash cows, because even if they are sick, they recover fast. The real health issues are with either the very young or very old, as in less than 6 years old, and more than 60 years old, insurance companies want none of those, and even under Obamacare will figure out ways to shed them, or give them the runaround, but they are really interest in earning age, 18+ or 22+ to 35 youth, who even if they get hit by a disease, they bounce back in no time and cost very little. But they have the choice not to buy it anyway, and pay the tax penalty, and if that gets too out of control, don't pay the taxes at all, let alone the tax penalties. The only option then is getting jailed and executed, so what. Give them the finger right before they execute you. Over money.

Re:in other words

[Bartles]

The difference being that the people on the left that recognized it as a giant clusterfuck, still supported it and the politicians that forced it upon us. Authoritarians don't care if their provided services are good or bad.

Re:in other words

[Bartles]

Thanks for destroying them with facts and logic.

Re:in other words

[ganjadude]

right, when the dems control all 2 seats, you cant blame the otherside, its laughable.

Re:in other words

[Shortguy881]

How about instead of asking us to justify why healthcare isn't a basic human right, why don't you explain your reasoning behind it being a basic human right?

I'd really like to hear a justification for thinking you are entitled to healthcare. I've heard ample people throw out that claim, but none of them have ever made a compelling argument as to why it is a basic human right.

Re:in other words

[ganjadude]

Chambers, not seats

Re:in other words

[ganjadude]

because.....bush!

Re:in other words

[ganjadude]

im not sure which is worse, knowing it was bad but still pushing it through, or actually believing it wasnt bad.

Re:in other words

[Pascoea]

That really is an excellent question. It's tough to answer, beyond the usual "Why SHOULDN'T we have free healthcare, you a heartless asshole."

My initial though is, I am entitled to healthcare because we live in a civilized country, and it is the moral thing to do. And people have a basic right to live out their natural life alive. If someone gets dragged into the hospital dying, your choices are to help him or let him die. Human beings, for the most part, are designed to be compassionate. The "I'd rather just let him die" people are in the definite minority. (Again, leaving the financial argument out of it) Now you just have to figure out how to pay for keeping that person alive.

And to me, it only makes sense, purely from a financial perspective. I pay $XXX per month, my employer pays $YYYY for "Health Insurance". I use quotes because it's not really insurance. I carry car insurance because if something catastrophic happens to my car I will need a new one. If I don't have car insurance I don't get a new car. If I don't get a new car, my life will be significantly inconvenienced, but I'll still be alive. I carry health insurance because if I don't carry it and something catastrophic happens they will still do what is reasonable and necessary to make sure I don't die. Wait, what? Yup, it still gets paid for. They will ruin me financially if I don't have insurance, but they aren't going to lock me out of the hospital, and SOMEONE is going to end up paying for it.

So, now we have the insurance companies. Their job is solely to sit between me and my hospital. And they "earn", collectively, over $13B in profit annually to do so. That's a shit load of money. And that is just the profit. That come's after they have paid their thousands and thousands of employee's salary. I know it's the norm to hate on insurance companies, but holy shit, what value do they add to this equation?

Re:in other words

[NoKaOi]

it was a giant clusterfuck...also, water is wet

Yep. True of any big undertaking when contractors are involved (whether it's government or a large corporation hiring the contractors for a big project). How about this:
-The defense department undertook the development of F-35 and its related systems without effective planning or oversight practices...
-[The task] was a complex effort with compressed time frames. To be expedient, DoD issued task orders ... when key technical requirements were unknown...
-DoD identified major performance issues ... but took only limited steps to hold Lockheed Martin accountable.
-DoD gave a lot more money to Lockheed due to changes such as new requirements and other enhancements...

The difference between healthcare.gov and any other big project is the politicalization of it. On one hand, you have the people who want health insurance so they can get medical care. On the other hand, you have insurance companies that want to keep the old system because they make higher profits. With the F-35 you only have one side...the defense contractors who want to make tons of money.

Re:in other words

[I'm New Around Here]

... I believe you and I have the right to provide for ourselves ...

So you've provided yourself with $500,000 for a liver/heart transplant or for a lifetime of $300/month drugs that may be required for your continued living? The non-obama-care insurance isn't providing an answer: They limit medical care to $200,000, which eliminates all complex surgery.

So, your assertion is that before obamacare, no complex surgeries were ever done? Or only the rich 1% were able to have transplants? Really?

This is the biggest problem with trying to discuss something substantive. Idiots throw out comments like yours, thinking they made a valid point. When a little reasoning quickly shows they are moronic statements with no connection to reality.

Re:in other words

[I'm New Around Here]

I believe you and I have the right to provide for ourselves. I don't believe we have the right to force others to provide for us.

I'm not a big believer in rights, per se. But I don't really have a problem with socialized medicine either.

Thank you for the reply.

I've said before that I would not oppose basic health care being taken care of by a national health system. Areas like car accident victims, broken bones, heart attacks, allergic reactions. Routine ER situations. But if I am to support that system with my tax dollars, the people who use it have to do their part to try to live healthy lives. Drug addicts and alcoholics get treatment then go into rehab, overweight people are put on a healthy diet and exercise regimen, and so on. But since that would violate people's rights, and I can't force my beliefs onto others, even when they are using my tax dollars, I don't support a public health system.

We have the safety net of welfare/food stamps/medicaid for the poor. We have insurance that is easy to get for the rest, with only a few exceptions that are truly 'uninsurable' due to birth defects or genetic disorders. There are still ways to get them covered by insurance, since large corporations and governments provide comprehensive insurance to all employees and their dependents. I would even be ok with the government 'hiring' the uninsurable just to get them onto the insurance available to federal employees, or making a version of Medicaid specifically for the people with high-cost conditions.

My views aren't as draconian as my hypothetical situation may suggest, since we of course are not the last 500 humans left alive. But given the waste, fraud, and abuse of the current system, I just don't see the benefits of making it even more vast with less control over it.

Re:in other words

[Sabriel]

But if I am to support that system with my tax dollars, the people who use it have to do their part to try to live healthy lives. Drug addicts and alcoholics get treatment then go into rehab, overweight people are put on a healthy diet and exercise regimen, and so on. But since that would violate people's rights, and I can't force my beliefs onto others, even when they are using my tax dollars, I don't support a public health system.

I don't get it. How would that violate rights? When society assumes an obligation to offer help to its members, members who seek out that help to correct their personal failings assume the reciprocal obligation of not "crying wolf" (not quite the phrase I want to use, but I hope it's close enough that you get what I'm trying to convey). "Society, I'm addicted / obese, please treat me." "Our obligation is that we will treat you, but your obligation is that you'll accept our help in avoiding this situation in the future." "Okay." The whole basis of society is the social contract - we help you, you help us!

The technicalities of deciding when any given person is not meeting that reciprocal obligation should only impinge on the general availability of a public health system to the extent that the statistical occurrence of recalcitrant individuals would make the system a net burden or benefit to society. And even then, that is not necessarily an argument to completely reject a public health system instead of the less drastic response of narrowing its scope.

Re:in other words

[I'm New Around Here]

So when you said:

The non-obama-care insurance isn't providing an answer: They limit medical care to $200,000, which eliminates all complex surgery.

what you meant was that some people had insurance that only provided the amount of coverage they were willing to pay for.

I don't see how that makes the point you are trying to make. People had choices on what they wanted for insurance. Many people specifically chose jobs based on insurance coverage, willing to take a lower paying job that had higher insurance coverage. The $200,000 amount is something you pulled out of thin air, because there was no such ceiling across the board, either at every insurance company, or on every policy, or from every employer offering benefits.

Were there annual limits and lifetime limits? Yes. If you don't know why then you don't understand insurance. It's that simple.

Has obamacare outlawed annual and lifetime limits? Yes. Which is why nearly everyone is seeing their premiums increasing. If the insurance company has no limit on possible expenditures, they must take in a lot more money to be able to cover those future costs. So now, in that regard, all policies are equivalent to the highest priced plans that corporate executives have had, with the pricetag to match. Everyone now gets the privilege of paying for very expensive insurance, because people like yourself don't understand insurance.

If you want to discuss the issue, I would be more than willing to do so. But when you make idiotic statements like "insurance had a $200,000 cap" which eliminated "complex surgery", I will call you out on them. If you instead want to focus on your own fantasy world, in opposition to the one I laid out, what do you need me for? Go create your own version of history where people had no choice in their own insurance.

By the way, my scenario was not about insurance. It was about human rights. But don't let that fact get in your way.

Re:in other words

[sysrammer]

Sorry, the 'pubs have tried to kill Obamacare dozens of times. When faced with a relentless enemy one has to put up a relentless defense. Yeah, the 'pubs were right; anyone with an IT background would have known the same. But delay was also a political move, defended by another political move.

So, yeah, sucks, but any big IT project has major problems. It had to be rolled out everywhere at once else there would be charges of political favoritism.

Re:in other words

[ganjadude]

so what you are saying, if i understand correctly is fuck the reality of things, we need to keep up the political theater to screw the people

that makes the dems look EVEN worse in my mind when you put it that way.

"sorry folks, we know the website is broken, but we are going to force you to use it so we can save face with the other side"

thats cowardice

Re:in other words

[ganjadude]

i think you need to look at fergison MO, i dont think its republicans out there on the streets rioting....

Re:in other words

[almechist]

+5, Insightful. What we wanted was health care what we got was health insurance. Not the same thing.

We do not have health insurance anymore. Insurance is "in case ya...", like in case your house burns down or in case you crash your car. What we have now is completely disjointed from the traditional insurance model. You can now drop your insurance, pay a small "fine/tax/whateverObamacallsit" and then purchase the health plan when you need it and then drop it when you don't, which will completely screw up the entire industry. That's not insurance.

Except nobody is going to do this, because for one it's just not that easy to do, but mainly (and this may shock you) because most people do want to have insurance in case of an emergency. I'm no fan of Obamacare, despite the fact that it's been enormously helpful to me personally, and in fact has already quite literally saved my life. Regardless, the ACA was a broken piece of legislation from the start, and the only positive thing I have to say about it is that it's marginally better than what we had before. But I don't believe your particular criticism is valid, and the proof is that the big insurance companies are still making big bucks, for the most part they love the ACA. So what you suggest just doesn't seem to be happening in the real world, at least not so far. This is not to say Obamacare isn't deserving of hundreds of other criticisms, but the "people will buy it only when they get sick" thing doesn't seem to be a real worry, so far.

Re:in other words

[sysrammer]

Reality is that any and all methods were and are being used to kill Obamacare. Dems can't trust Pubs with any legislation regarding Obamacare, lest it be a trap. All big systems have problems; they get fixed eventually. It will take a couple of years to fully stabilize. Reality.

Re:in other words

[ganjadude]

so eventhough obama did EXACTLY what the republicans asked for to avoid the shutdown...in your eyes the shutdown is still the republicans fault....

this right here, is just one of the many problems with this country these days

Re:in other words

[DRJlaw]

If you have a small population of people, say 500, and the rest of humanity disappears, what 'rights' do they have? Does one person have the right to live in peace, without one of the other 499 attacking him/her? There is no such right in the natural world where lions attack zebras or hornets attack bears. Do people have that right? Personally I don't believe they do...

Now let's say that one of the 500 is a general practitioner, and has the knowledge needed to treat common conditions the group will face. What if he doesn't want to do so? If he decides he wants to be alone to contemplate his own beliefs for a while, in light of the disappearance of the rest of humanity, does the rest of the group have the right to force him to be their doctor? If he wants to move away, start a small farm to raise vegetables and forget all his medical knowledge, does the group have the right to force him to train someone as an apprentice/replacement? If he will agree to see some people but not others, for whatever reason, do the others have a right to force him to see them as well? Do they have the right to follow him around begging for his attention? Do they have the right to force him into their hut to care of their ailing mate? If he refuses to do so, and fights his way free of such an action, is he to be punished for hurting the person accosting him?

In response to all those questions, my answer would be that the person with knowledge that may be essential for the survival of the group does not have the obligation to act on or dispense that knowledge. Or, in terms of rights, the group does not have the right to force the (former) doctor to do something he is not willing to do anymore. They don't have the right to violate his rights of not being attacked, personal beliefs, or privacy.

So, in conclusion, no I don't think people have a 'right to healthcare'.

That's odd. Because based upon the premise of your argument, people do have a right to healthcare (assuming that the doctor does not wish to die).

Yes, if you strip everything back to the law of nature (Locke-world), and create your own positve law, you can eliminate a right to healthcare. Or, you can enact a positive law creating a right to healthcare. That's the thing about positive law - it is whatever you construct it to be.

But don't argue that there is no natural law right to healthcare. The moment you rely purely upon natural law, there's a right to anything that the stongest dictates, because the strongest (the one with the most power at that instant) can attach that to the only right that matters in that system -- the right to exercise force to obtain what one wants.

Consider this an object lesson in a 'philosophy fail.'

Re:in other words

[Shortguy881]

"I'm entitled to it because it exists" is not a valid answer and shows you put zero thought into your stance. Not only is that not even remotely sustainable, but that type of philosophical argument is why our society is in the shitter. Internet exists, so Im entitled to that as well. Cell phones exists so I'm entitled to one of those too. There are people who think that way.

Life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are our basic rights, inalienable rights. This goes well beyond just the US Constitution and into the "Age of Enlightenment" and is the work of several well known philosophers. These rights are things that no man can take away from you or deny you from having. This does not constitute tangible things and to think so is pure ignorance. These are things like speaking ones mind, writing and reading what you want, living your life your way without infringing on others free will. This, of course, is all based on egoism or social contract theory.

Even if we look at this from a utilitarianism point of view, in so much as society as a whole is better if it shares healthcare among all its citizens, you run into larger problems. This is only better for a society were everyone is contributing to society. If someone isn't contributing, they should then be removed. Why waist resources on the non-producers? This is arguably much worse than social contract theory.

And before you burst in with its better for utilitarianism if we keep everyone alive, that's an unarguable point that bypasses reality. Healthcare is a limited resource and must be distributed as such. That being the case, a utilitarian society would need to pick someone to not receive treatment, so that others can.

As for the rest of your dribble on insurance, that had nothing to do with my initial question.

Re:in other words

[genkernel]

That is not what sysrammer is saying. He is saying that the republicrats (not to mention the insurance industry) were stonewalling and attempting to cause delays, and that the demipubs were in danger of having the delay ending up in the same stasis field the patriot act is in.

So what he is saying is that the political theater needed to be disrupted in order for things to progress at all, even if the reality of things wasn't pretty.

I'm so glad

[sabbede]

I don't work for a company that made the mistake of getting involved in that nightmare.

Re:I'm so glad

[Chrisq]

I don't work for a company that made the mistake of getting involved in that nightmare.

I'm pretty sure that a lot of companies are doing just fine out of it - paid to deliver the wrong thing then paid to deliver what the government should have specified in the first place.

Re:I'm so glad

[StikyPad]

It's actually relatively common for custom software to experience feature and scope creep. The source of creep is split between design by committee and leadership changes. When new leadership comes in, the vision almost always changes, and when new stakeholders are added, they pollute the water with their own special interests.

It's arguably the role of developers (or at least business analysts) to push back against ridiculous requirements, and some do, but they're not properly incentivized, since they work for the contractor. BAs should be working for the government, not the contractors. Ideally, one person with software development design and management experience and a clear vision should be in charge of the project. Unfortunately, it's almost always someone with more generalized management experience who doesn't know the difference between HTML and CSS, and comes up with new "great ideas" on the fly.

At any rate, the problem isn't limited to government software -- I've seen the same thing in commercial business software, especially "customizable" software. I'm looking at you, mortgage and scientific industries. We get a little more upset because we fund government software through taxes -- we feel like it's our money -- but we honestly fund almost all poorly designed software, even if it's rolled into our mortgages. It's just less transparent.

Out of Character for Government?

[rmdingler]

A group of master thieves with no conscience,

who are working round the clock to skim money from a project,

are still unable to run up costs like a government project gone off the rails.

Re: Out of Character for Government?

[jd2112]

You are giving them way to much credit. Don't attribute to malice which can be easily explained by incompetence.

CYA

[orlanz]

Somebody had to take the fall, and I guess they found the one group who didn't do the proper amount of CYA. Actually enumerating the failures and irresponsiblities of the various parties involved from the politicians down to the subcontractors... would have been too much work.

I guess they will just fire 1-2 guys and move the rest to other projects like "Heathcare.gov support" and file this report some where the sun never shines.

Let's be absolutely clear

[argStyopa]

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!

Re:Let's be absolutely clear

[Anonymous Coward]

Who are you going to hold responsible?

The White House - at the highest level - was pushing an unrealistic time frame. The President rewarded the policy wonks by letting them be in charge of implementing the project. The House refused to provide funding for implementation.

Not saying it would have worked anyway, but the sources of the problems are in positions that are accountable only on election day.

Re:Let's be absolutely clear

[Rockoon]

The House refused to provide funding for implementation.

...besides the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on it?

Re:Let's be absolutely clear

[bill_mcgonigle]

No punishments or consequences, all around!

No government worker will be fired, but don't worry, three hundred million people will be collectively punished for it as that billion dollars gets added to the debt and all their cost-of-goods prices go up.

Sadly, that feedback loop never seems to get closed. Results don't matter - as long as there are promises and intentions, that's good enough for most.

what's the difference

[Chadster]

between that and most private sector projects?

Except for technical companies, almost every large project during my 30 year IT career had the same issues and reasons for failing.

Re:what's the difference

[ganjadude]

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

Re:what's the difference

[ganjadude]

obviously i was referring to the point that i DONT have to do business with them if i dont like what they are doing. Cant get away with that when its the government

better summary

[slashmydots]

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.

Re:better summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I'm pretty sure we was saying "don't hire somebody who's a friend and instead hire somebody who's competent", but hey, why let the meaning go through when that meaning would stop you from bringing up a president that hasn't been in office for what, almost 6 years now?

Re:better summary

[slashmydots]

I've never met anyone who's so polarized politically that they can't actually read...until now.

Why dont we

[thaylin]

Put the money for the contract, plus 10% into escrow. Every 10% into the projects completion you get 10% of the money. If you cannot complete it for that price, that is on you, not the tax payers, learn to better account for your work. If you can show that it was due to the government itself then that is what the extra 10% is for, if not and you fail the project we still got that amount of work done and can pass it to the next contractor in the bid to start working on. I am so tired of hearing about these massive cost overruns.

Re:Why dont we

[ka9dgx]

Because 10% of a working system can't be measured. Even a 100% completed to spec system is worthless until it has actually been used for a while... when it will prove to need about 100% more work.

Most software projects fail, unlike construction, etc... engineering can't be applied.

Re:Why dont we

[thaylin]

You can prove that 10% of the feature set is done. when you agree to a contract you agree to a timeline and a feature set.

Re:Why dont we

[Andy Dodd]

That's pretty much how government contracts work.

It fails because:
1) The customer will change their requirements mid-stream, screwing everything up
2) Even if they don't, in some cases it's discovered once everything is complete that the system which meets all of the customer's requirements is utterly fucking useless in the real world. I believe this was a major role in healthcare.gov's failures - many of its issues were discovered post-launch

Re:Why dont we

[kellymcdonald78]

Then I hope you enjoy your "sports car" that sits 8, has 5 square wheels, no brakes and a 14 HP engine. Built exactly how the client asked for it. Most government RFPs are terrible, written by people in procurement who have no clue what they're asking for. Rarely is there any kind of defined feature set, or schedule, mostly its just a laundry list of things people raised in a couple of committee meeting, with a date some politician wants it by (usually tied to a campaign promise, or event), and a budget that someone pulled out of thin air.

Re:Why dont we

[kellymcdonald78]

Said someone who obviously has never worked with government

Re:Why dont we

[bitingduck]

And never worked large projects.

For some projects (not necessarily software, and not even necessarily that large) there aren't more than 2 or 3 companies that can do them, and they're all a pain to deal with.

Did you expect anything else?

[Anonymous Coward]

America hired a man to run the country who never even managed a McDonalds.

Why would they vet their contractors (or contracts) any better?

Re:Did you expect anything else?

[thrich81]

Well, I've got karma to burn and this AC got modded up to +2 insightful, so look, the argument that the current President and VP have never run/managed "anything" and so are unsuitable for the positions would be valid EXCEPT that the previous President and VP had vast private sector and government managerial experience (or at least they were sold to us that way) and they screwed up running the country at least as badly as the current administration. So, from observation of the actual, real world experiences we've gone through in the last 15 years it would seem to be clear that previous managerial experience has no correlation with good administration of the Executive branch of the US government.

Re:Did you expect anything else?

[Bartles]

Actually, just about every metric for measuring the economy is far worse now than it was 8 years ago. So no, both administrations aren't equally bad. The one you voted for and support is far worse.

Million Dollar...

[johnsnails]

Any one else think the article might be about a retina version of:
http://www.milliondollarhomepa...

How many millions....

[zoid.com]

How many millions did this investigation and report cost?

You spend a billion on lorem ipsum? Don't hire you

[raymorris]

> almost every large project during my 30 year IT career had the same issues and reasons for failing

They spent a billion dollars to post lorem ipsum https://www.healthcare.gov/med...

If almost every large project you're involved with is similar, we've learned one thing: Don't hire Chadster!

Repeat!

[felixrising]

Sounds remarkably like the Myki public transport ticketing system with it's associated blow-out to 1.5 Billion dollars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Although arguably Myki downgrade from the previous ticketing system. Clearly, planning and careful tendering and contract wording are vital in these big projects to hold the winning contractor to account, no changing contractors half way through or half arsed planning phase. Maybe it's just my thinking as an engineer, but so often these projects take on such a life of their own, what is really needed is a highly skilled and capable small core team of engineers and designers who build a working prototype and are able to make well thought out fast decisions on the move, then once it's been thoroughly tested, the big rollout happens, also with their oversight, you don't need huge numbers of program managers, project managers or project coordinators and nary a MBA should be in sight, you need people with the skills and knowledge to deliver the project, driving it, and only then farm out delegation work to other teams for specific deliverables to realise the bigger project.

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.

Re:F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

[david.emery]

...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...

I'm not defending the F-35 (I'm a huge A-10 fan, and 2 F-35s would fund the whole A-10 fleet), but your comment here is self-contradictory. Either we don't need it, OR it's trying to fill too many missions (that do need to be done.)

I think it's the latter, and that's not just requirements creep, but a different phenomenon that is something like "requirements conbinatorics", where too many requirements get loaded onto a system (health care or weapon) and the result is either (a) not buildable as a violation of math or physics or (b) massively complex and therefore massively expensive.

It's a combination of no discipline on the part of the users/managers who develop the specifications or needs statement, and the problem that the number of major system starts (whether DoD or commercial) is limited, so each user/stakeholder needs to get -His/Her Requirement- in place on this system, because they won't have a chance for another 10 years to get that requirement into their/their user's hands.

dave

Re:F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

[bill_mcgonigle]

Witness the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, an aircraft nobody needs

Don't play the game, man. Here's who needs it:

* Politicians, for pork
* Defense contractors, for "Sweet Jesus we're rolling in dough" money
* Lobbyists, for a slice of the dough.
* The Federal Reserve, the monopoly private bank that makes interest on the debt
* Wall Street bankers, who take a commission on the new debt created.

If you look at this as corruption instead of a mysterious boondoggle, it makes perfect sense.

There's absolutely zero chance of defeating an invisible enemy.

Re:You spend a billion on lorem ipsum? Don't hire

[Chadster]

I am just a technical guy, not the one writing business requirements, doing project management or signing off.

My point was, it is a general problem with how large technical projects are done and most "fail" because of the exact same reasons. This is not intended to start a discussion on techniques/methodologies.

I'm not trying to defend, it's just an observation.

Of course governments should be better at spending public money, but how can they be better when most organizations follow the same patterns and practices.

For the record, I don't work with or for any organization involved with that project.

Technical People

[cshamis]

Normally, in order to solicit a project of any appreciable size, (over 100K) the government is required to produce a detailed SOW (Statement of Work) that defines the scope and goals. As projects get bigger (over 100M) the SOW begins to get more and more generic, but the accompaning Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) gets more detailed, and much much longer (five, six, sometimes as deep as eight or nine sub-sections) Each sub-section may generate dozens of Task Orders (TOs). Task Orders are what get assigned to contractors to work. If the upper document is vauge, or poorly thought out, or poorly defined, then the individual TO may be nonsensical.

Okay... so who is writing this nonsense? Well, the Government can't have the contractors who will be doing the work come up with the work they will do. (That's putting a fox in the henhouse.) So the Government will sometimes turn to a special type of contractor called a SETA (Scientific Engineering Technical Adisor) or FFRDC employee (Federally Funded Resarch Development Center) to develop the approach and SOW, WBS, and sometimes even write the TO. A SETA or FFRDC is specially recognised in that, they (and their respective employer) are expressly forbidden from bidding on or performing work on ANY project for which they have acted as a SETA or FFRDC. It's a classic case of conflict of interest. And, usually these guys are pretty good. There was no SETA or for the Healthcare.gov website. It wasn't considered a "technical" project (like building a moon-lander) so... that was probably the first mistake.

The second mistake is that the people in Government who normally get tasked with writing the RFPs SOWs and evaulating them are usually the same people who aren't um... "smart enough" to figure out how to get out of it. (LIke the jury-duty joke) They's also the same folks who get tasked with evaulating the proposals that come back... again... not the sharpest tools in the shed. So... there's plenty of blame to go round.

The absense of personal accountability in Government encourages irresponsible behavior. But, too much accountability encourages paralysis. (I'm not signing off on that!) So until we figure out how to fix that too... well... this is just going to keep happening.

Many people fail. $billion should hire competence

[raymorris]

Sure, many people make the same mistakes. I'd hope that for a BILLION dollars, you could hire a couple of project managers who are actually competent. Plenty of companies have incompetent people, but plenty have lots of competent people who successfully complete projects - Google, eBay, Facebook, and a thousand other companies are competent at large scale IT projects.

If, like most projects, your budget is around $100K, you might end up with some typical incompetents in key positions. For a billion bucks, you should be able to have really, really good people in the key leadership positions making sure the project gets done. Was the person running the healthcare.gov project competent? Nobody was running it! I hope that's not like your typical project, I hope you actually HAVE a project manager at the head of most of your projects.

> Of course governments should be better at spending public money, but how can they be better

#1 Put someone in charge of the project.
#2 Choose someone who has successfully led a large project before.

It was the politicians more than CMS ...

[perpenso]

Note however there is one very important point missed in all the rhetoric... That of changing specification coupled with muddied/stratified change management. This issue sits squarely on CMSs shoulders and is absolute poison to any IT project of any significance...

It was the politicians more than CMS. Not that CMS didn't have its share of problem generation but folks in the administration doing political recalculations on what the user interface and functionality should be like probably made this problem far worse than your normal federal project.

Wasn't there some last minute change ordered by the administration not to show the unsubsidized policy price, so now the site had to integrate with various other agencies and exchange a lot of personal information to calculate an accurate subsidized price? Note that the subsidized price is absolutely unnecessary for comparison shopping. A person's subsidy is a constant, it does not change the price difference between policy A and policy B. If A cost $X more than B before subsidy it will still cost $X more after subsidy. It was purely a politically motivated change to avoid sticker shock on pricing.

Re:Semi-trolling but...

[I'm New Around Here]

It will be. Look ahead to 2016. Who are the front runners? Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney.

useless website

[BradMajors]

The worst part is there is no reason why the Obamacare websites even need to exist.

Obama could have just told everyone to buy their insurance on einsurance.com and to get the subsidies when they filed their 1040.

Fifth Bullet ...

[ilparatzo]

• The government will continue to operate all future, similar projects in the exact same fashion, regardless of this report.

I'm shocked, SHOCKED...

[mi]

I can't be the only one shocked, SHOCKED to discover, the government is inefficient and wastes money. I mean, after the staggering success of everything else it operates — things like US Postal Service or Amtrak — it is certainly most disappointing to encounter a government program, that fails to live-up to our high expectations.

Nay, this may even chill our collective enthusiasm for making food and shelter a government's responsibility too — you can't be healthy without nutrition and a roof above your head, can you, so it only would've seem natural to further expand the government's omniscient and benevolent control into that direction. But not any more... Not quite...

All Hail Maximum Leader Barack

[gelfling]

Another is His infinite string of divine victories. All dissidents are of course racist.

Timeline of events

[acoustix]

It would be nice if someone has a compiled timeline of events starting with extremely uncoordinated writing and passing of the law, to the point where technical specs were released to the contractor, when the actually flow of information and final HHS rules were announced, up through go live and the fixes being implemented after go live.

From what I've read/heard there was little to no work being done from 2010 when the bill was signed into law up through 2012. The administration purposely withheld information about Obamacare from the public and from the contractor due to the election year (2012) and didn't want bad press. Once the election had passed the government released more specs and information to the public and to the contractor on how the website was supposed to function. That's when we found out the dirty little lies and secrets. It's damn near impossible to build a website/service to handle 300M+ people in 6 months, but that's what our government did.

This whole bill/law/implementation has been bungled so badly by:
- the incompetent people who wrote it (bureaucrats with no understanding of health care and did not consult people from the health care industry)
- the incompetent people in Congress who blindly passed it without reading or understanding the devastating effect it would have
- the incompetent administration who continued to lie about how the law affected the citizens, and took no ownership of this massive project

Can anyone imagine a scenario where this could have been handled worse? Every step along the way was screwed up.

Re:Silly rabbit, hypotheticals are for kids.

[ganjadude]

well, we have a president(and have had others) who swore to uphold the constitution and we all see how well that worked out

They called it "agile", but was it?

[emmerson.steven]

From the full report:

The four reviews shown in figure 5—architecture, project baseline, final detailed design, and operational readiness— are among those required under the exchange life cycle framework, the governance model CMS specifically designed to meet the need to quickly develop the FFM and data hub using the Agile development approach.

Sounds like "waterfall" to me.

Re:Silly rabbit, hypotheticals are for kids.

[I'm New Around Here]

Hypotheticals may be for kids, but your response is for mental patients.

Is it wrong for a person to be bound by his or her own word? When do they get to break or bend it?

When the rest of humanity disappears for no known reason.

Or do you expect the 500 people to still pay their taxes and obey all traffic laws as well as oaths given to professional associations that no longer exist?

If doctors all swore an oath to provide medical care, why are they insisting people pay them for that care? Your assertion is they must provide the care whether they get paid or not. Have you just solved the problem of health care? Simply insist doctors all work for no pay because their oaths outlive humanity?

Pascoea asked a particular point, which I responded to. I don't agree with his view on this one issue, but at least he has the integrity to offer a challenge in a fair way. Your response is simply brainless drivel. "Doctor's can't violate their oath, because we learned in kindergarten that's bad." The most ridiculous part of it is that if the doctor violates their oath, they are not allowed to practice medicine anymore. Which is the exact situation that my hypothetical was exploring.

Re:Silly rabbit, hypotheticals are for kids.

[I'm New Around Here]

Oh, you can't go there. The obamabots will get you for sure.

It's sad that they simply don't care that the person elected to uphold the Constitution has said that he doesn't believe in it, and has acted consistently to prove he doesn't believe in it. He actually doesn't believe in the document that created the office that he fills.

*COUGH*

[hurfy]

Mine says, "Lifewise"

It also says, "Essential Silver 2500 HSA" which defines it as one selected from the website. The network name probably identifies it also. Not to mention the 4 other id numbers on the card.

Not sure why a doctor would care as they seem to be rather normal insurance plans but they could tell if they wish.

Medicare/Medicaid are a whole other story. Often patients don't have the copay and that is profit for many procedures/items due to low payments on SOME things. (and some are still overpaid) Often the additional paperwork and the threat of an audit put many off accepting those. Or, as in my case, All of the above plus the fact I can't afford the bookkeeper JUST for 3rd party billings.

I currently sell medical supplies and did the books for a medical supplier for almost 20 years.
Survived a Medicare audit and a Sales Tax audit with no penalties ...don't try this at home!

Re:Silly rabbit, hypotheticals are for kids.

[I'm New Around Here]

Your whole argument is based on a doctor who took an oath. What about someone who has medical knowledge, but never took an oath and became a practicing doctor? Would he or she still be bound by your beliefs in what doctors should do, or could be forced to do? That is a very weak linchpin to base a human right around.

As for whether or not I should use a hypothetical situation to prove my point, isn't that a common way of teaching in college classes? Not simply saying a rote answer, but making people think through a situation and its consequences? I know I'm not the first person to envision an "isolated group of humans" scenario. As for it being "fair", I never claimed it was. I said that Pascoea offered a challenge in a fair way. I answered in a manner I felt appropriate to impart the reasoning behind my simple answer of "No".

Good day, sir.

Former construction/contract manager.

[technosaurus]

I used to work for NAVFAC, the U. S. Navy version of contract management for construction projects.  Though there was a lot of bureaucracy involved, the planning and design phase always had plenty of experts to ensure the specifications were above most commercial standards (LEED certifications, military requirements, utmost safety requirements, etc...)  Though many aspects of the process used archaic technology (lots of paper forms, area expert controlled word documents as best practices,...), the end result was that most projects ended up being completed on time and on budget (though the start sometimes got shifted so the review could be thorough ... unless October 1 was coming, but that is a different subject - or maybe not, this project had similar time deadlines).  A lot of this success was due to savvy construction managers doing appropriate "horse-trading" with contractors to avoid the lengthy change processes (which could delay anywhere from a day to 12 months).  When you have (non-technical) contract managers who don't know the reasoning behind the requirements, they have little recourse but to go through the official processes to resolve complex issues... _This_ is where you get your delays.  For the most part, a good hour spent in design/planning will yield ~10 in production, but it is important for the project manager to be intimately involved so this wisdom can actually be _useful_.  I can attest to my own anecdotal experience and my observation of others, that coming into a project at production phase is more than just a steep learning curve; some things just have weird historical issues.  Here are a few that I ran into after another CM was transferred elsewhere:
- endangered species in the area
- abandoned toxic waste in the soil
- asbestos
- this site used to be a WW2 bombing range and guess what?...We found a bunch of unexploded ordinance.
- hurricane damage
- tornado damage

Re:Silly rabbit, hypotheticals are for kids.

[I'm New Around Here]

Sir, I said good day.

Re:Silly rabbit, hypotheticals are for kids.

[I'm New Around Here]

It was true long before that incident. Your blind partisanship is showing.

Re:Silly rabbit, hypotheticals are for kids.

[I'm New Around Here]

Wow. That's a fair amount of over-reacting to a common punchline, given when one is tired of suffering a fool. Also, it is not my fault you cannot fathom the reason people use manufactured scenarios to explore or explain human nature. You are the one who has consistently been showing your lack of mental abilities, insisting that an oath precludes a person from acting in their own interest, rather than in the interest of others, simply because you say so. Especially since I pointed out that the person may have never given such an oath.

If there was no oath, your argument is simply a lot of hot air. You can't accept that fact. You keep blustering on about my hypothetical, as if your own point is anything but partisan ravings against a point you don't agree with.

That is why I said good day.

Re:Silly rabbit, hypotheticals are for kids.

[I'm New Around Here]

Wow. That's the best you can do? That's the most pathetic insult I've received all year.

As for my 'partisan bias', I've stated on this forum and others that I voted for Mr. Obama back in 2008, and for Jill Stein of the Green Party in 2012. I don't regret either vote.

So go stuff your preconceived notions of my political and social bias right back up from where you pulled them.

Re:Silly rabbit, hypotheticals are for kids.

[I'm New Around Here]

This is almost getting amusing, if only you weren't such a broken record. You think I am at fault because you cannot understand any system other then your own. You are still talking about an assumed doctor's oath, when I have shown there is not need to assume an oath. Yet you still hang your argument on it, and then say I am the one who can't handle reality.

Yes, we live in the real world, not the mental exercise I used as a mere explanation of my views on a particular point in a large debate about human rights. However, you are saying that my views are only valid in that mental exercise, not the real world. My views are my own, and I have the right to them the same as you have the right to your views. The real difference here, is that I acknowledge you have the right to your own views, even though they are in opposition to my own.

You are trying to deny my right to my own views, and using the 'oath' and 'hypothetical' arguments to force me to change my views so that they match your own. I have seen many people like you, over the 20 years I have been having these sorts of discussions, both online and in real life. You are so convinced of your own superiority and rightness, you can't even comprehend someone else's viewpoint enough to intelligently argue about it.

You have to focus on one or two insignificant (and incorrect) points, and keep bullying your way through until your opponents either give in and leave the discussion, or you push them to lash out at your intransigence, and then you can declare the moral high ground over some 'mere unenlightened savage'.

Given the complexity of the project

[ToddInSF]

...and I don't just mean the technical aspects, what I'm talking about is how the technical information to make the project work being spread across multiple organizations that do not necessarily share information much less have systems and methods in place for inter-agency cooperation. You can't come up with an adequate analogy between this project and any others, because there haven't been any similarly complex projects.

Yes, it feels good to bitch about how incompetent "the government" is, but THAT dialogue is always about a political agenda, and not a factually descriptive language.

When you rush a project and dump money into it your results are as expected. No political agenda and deceptions necessary.

And if they can't?

[eric_harris_76]

And if the federal government can't improve its processes for such things, perhaps it will quit attempting them. After all, screw up enough things badly enough, and it'll run out of money, and go away. Such is the nature of failed institutions.

Oh, wait. That won't happen. Two reasons: IRS and Federal Reserve.

Of course, it could go away without running out of money. Two examples: Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe. The places were still there, but they had dramatic changes in management.

Such is the nature of failed institutions.