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The Billion-Dollar Website

Posted by Soulskill on from the get-what-you-paid-for-minus-a-billion-dollars dept.

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...

35 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. Technical People by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
    1. Re:Technical People by Chrisq · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Technical People by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Technical People by BringsApples · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.

      --
      Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
    4. Re:Technical People by david.emery · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Technical People by LordLucless · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    6. Re:Technical People by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    7. Re:Technical People by oneandoneis2 · · Score: 4, Informative

      "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.

      --
      So.. it has come to this
    8. Re:Technical People by trout007 · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
    9. Re:Technical People by Wycliffe · · Score: 2

      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.

    10. Re:Technical People by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    11. Re:Technical People by poached · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    12. Re:Technical People by Dr.+Evil · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    13. Re:Technical People by Bartles · · Score: 2

      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.

    14. Re:Technical People by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 2

      > 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.

      --
      I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
    15. Re:Technical People by ThatAblaze · · Score: 2

      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.

  2. in other words by ganjadude · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

    --
    have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
    1. Re:in other words by ganjadude · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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

      --
      have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
    2. Re:in other words by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:in other words by Pascoea · · Score: 3, Interesting
      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.)

    4. Re:in other words by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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

      --
      If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
  3. I'm so glad by sabbede · · Score: 2

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

    1. Re:I'm so glad by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:I'm so glad by StikyPad · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
  4. Let's be absolutely clear by argStyopa · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The key takeaway from the report is that nobody will be personally held to blame for the incompetence (at best; corruption and nepotism at worst) of the process and end result.

    No punishments or consequences, all around!

    --
    -Styopa
    1. Re:Let's be absolutely clear by Rockoon · · Score: 2

      The House refused to provide funding for implementation.

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

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
  5. better summary by slashmydots · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:better summary by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

      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?

  6. Re:what's the difference by ganjadude · · Score: 5, Insightful

    the difference is that if its a private company doing it, we are not all paying for it. I dont care if a private company wastes a billion dollars, that has nothing to do with me and the rest of america. but when the government does it, it becomes an issue for all of us

    --
    have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
  7. Why dont we by thaylin · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    When you cant win, ad hominem.
    1. Re:Why dont we by ka9dgx · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  8. Did you expect anything else? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

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

  9. Million Dollar... by johnsnails · · Score: 2

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

  10. You spend a billion on lorem ipsum? Don't hire you by raymorris · · Score: 2

    > 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!

  11. F-35 Joint Strike Fighter by tekrat · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.