Are you expecting the Vice President of the United States to micro manage an IT Project? Should he be micro-managing every other website on the government books?
There were obvious screw-ups here. And it will probably be at least a year before everything is up and working. But the level of hyperbole you are levelling here is over the top and tiresome.
a) Ensure that important & expensive projects are run by managers that don’t mislead, lie or get fooled by their subordinate managers
b) Cause those who screw up to be fired
No, I’m expecting him to macro manage it - IOW, to ensure that those charged with responsibility (e.g. Sebelius) are managing properly, and are held accountable.
I was certainly not expecting that his idea of proper management would be to assume without evidence that a complex project will naturally run smoothly. That’s abject, shameful incompetence.
I feel it set the obvious stage for the people who created the failure to be bear-trap set with their 'I-told-you-so’s. It also drops the weight of those 'I-told-you-so’s down to nothing.
Willfully and intentionally sabotaging government programs meant to serve the best interests of the American people in the hopes of overthrowing the American government… There used to be words for that starting with T.
“And you feel this justifies Biden’s approach of just assuming the system would be up and ready to run?”
The accountability stage will happen. The priority now though is to get things working. As I said: the fix for this will take at least a year. We are going through something very similar over here, the Novapaydebacle. As bad as the healthcare website launch has been: it doesn’t come close to the level of badness as the Novapay debacle. Two people lost their jobs and a third resigned. This happened nearly a year after the website launched. If you are expecting heads to roll less than thirty days after the website launch then you are going to be disappointed.
You **are **expecting Biden to micro-manage the project. We aren’t talking accountability yet. We are talking about Biden’s “approach of just assuming the system would be up and ready to run.” Stop trying to take the topic away from your words. I’m sure when Biden asked “is everything fine” he was informed “everything is fine.” Sebelius would have been told that everything is fine because she would have been told that by the Project boss/marketing person who would have been told that by the Managers who would have been told that by the Team Leaders. It is the guys at the end of the process though: the coders/developers, etc, that would have known the real but incomplete story. They would be the ones on the ridiculous timelines, the ones having to deal with requirements changing right up to the last minute. The anatomy of the website failure will end up looking like every other major IT blunder over the last few years. The scope of the project changed from the start of the project to the end, no-one at the IT company end said “no, we can’t do this in this time frame and we won’t be able to deliver” and the coders/etc worked their asses off to get this thing as close to spec as possible. They can’t just “fire everyone.” They can’t just bring new people onto the project. There isn’t an easy fix to this. It is just going to take time.
What you are seeing here is something that is common in the IT industry. It isn’t a good thing. It is something that needs to be fixed. The IT industry needs to change how it does things and it needs to learn how to correctly manage their clients. But Biden’s alleged failure to micro-manage the healthcare website is only a very small part of the picture. You need to retune your outrage meter and figure out what actually happened here.
Should that not have been the priority 6 months or a year ago?
I don’t consider requiring those responsible to track and report progress to be micro-managing.
From the moment ACA became law, Biden and/or Obama should have been saying to Sibelius: “It’s really important this roll out smoothly, so we want you to be double-sure that those responsible are consistently demonstrating that their progress is on schedule.”
But everything was far from fine, and competent managers don’t let themselves be fobbed off with BS.
In a democracy, we vote. You win, you win. You lose, you lose. We had to put up with Bush and The Patriot Act because an election was lost.
The affordable healthcare act passed & is law. Wrong headed; we’ll let historians 20 years from now debate that. Its the law now and as such, not negotiable.
Managers don’t manage by vote or consensus. Employees do as they say, or armed security walks them to the door. If the Executive is to wield power over a government as a project manager would, as you seem to want to see done
for maximum efficiency, they would have had to have dragged out of Congress several non-productive employees a year or so ago and “fired” them.
Is that what you were looking for? Because tempting as it would be to see how much hang time each of those obstructionists would have when booted off a DC curb, its just not the American system of government.
…is that a serious question? The system hadn’t launched six months ago. It has launched now: and bits aren’t working. The priority is to get those things fixed. You can’t fix something that wasn’t broken six months ago. There is an old software adage: all softwarehasbugs.
That wasn’t what you were asking. You were mocking Biden because he said he wasn’t a technology geek. You want him to become a technology geek. You expect him to micro manage the project, yet you don’t want him to micro manage the project. I suspect that you will never be happy whatever they choose to do.
What on earth makes you think they didn’t ask this? Again: are you being serious? Or do you have a cartoon view of how the real world works?
Yes: this happened because Sibelius wasn’t “double sure.” :rolleyes: If only Obama had told Sibelius that “this was VERY VERY IMPORTANT” then everything would be okay.
Yeah, keep that outrage meter going! STONE THEM!
Obama is the President of the most powerful nation in history. He gets done more in a week than I get done in a year. He isn’t a corporate CEO. He isn’t a Project Manager. The role is a mixture of symbolic duties mixed together with some really important things. What happened here was a website launch got screwed up. It is being fixed. No-one has died. Some people haven’t been able to log into a website. It will probably cost a bit more money than anticipated to fix. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be angry about this or that you shouldn’t be demanding this be fixed. I’m saying your outrage is misplaced. Biden’s job isn’t to “manage technology geeks” just like it isn’t to manage soldiers, or to manage engineers, or to manage climate scientists or rubbish collectors or teachers or janitors or census collectors or judges or any other manner of job that is either directly employed or contracted out on behalf of the government.
More like FIRE THEM! You are apparently not a good project manager either because you have no idea whatsoever what you are talking about. You are giving irrelevant cites about “all software has bugs” without even understanding the context or what that means. It is true that all software has bugs but that has little relevance for a project like this. There are small glitches which are always expected and then there is complete failure. We are dealing with the latter here.
I work on IT projects very similar to this one for a living. Let me say this again, you have no idea about the problems involved here and neither does the media. It isn’t about a website. That is just the user interface that the public sees and it isn’t the critical part of the whole system. Any reasonably intelligent teenager with cash could build a website tonight that can handle tons of traffic. That isn’t the problem.
The true problem is that the back-end systems aren’t designed correctly. That is the part that transmits all of the information between the consumers and the health insurance companies to make it work.
Let me explain this to you very simply. The way it has been managed so far is naive and idiotic. The Executive level flowchart goes like this:
Americans log in and select their new coverage
Computers!
Computers???
Success!!!
The problem is that it is tremendously more complicated than that. I built systems just like Healthcare.gov for 4 years representing tens of millions of people with only rare and small glitches. I know more about it than 99.9999% of the people in the world and I know a number of other people that know more than I do. It is insane mismanagement to think that they can just pass a bill and all these thousands of different parts and contracts would just magically come together and work correctly.
I would be fired tomorrow if one of my projects went off the rails 10% as much as this one has and yet you seem to want to give them a pass because you imagine it must be complicated and you probably couldn’t do any better. That answer isn’t going to cut it with me because I can and have implemented several systems just like it and we didn’t fail. It only cost a fraction of a percent of the money spent on this one as well.
The bottom line is that the people exist in the U.S. to make this work right, they hired a Canadian contractor that blew it and the middle and upper management are a clusterfuck all around. The problem is also much more serious than laypeople understand. They all deserve be fired because they are incompetent.
And this is what truly fucking pisses me off. I’ve always been held accountable for my work. No exceptions. If it involved the accounting department then literally every cent was accounted for. If it involved estimates for a project then I had to show where my numbers came from. Why are the worker bees held to account and those in charge given license for the most obscene of mistakes?
It must be nice to fuck something up this badly and get a paycheck. But the answer is obvious, what are the qualifications for being a politician. There are none. And it shows.
Your answers seem blatantly obvious to me and quite reasonable but you might want to hang it up. There are a certain subset of Dopers who have never had a position of responsibility or understand how management hierarchies are supposed to work at all. They aren’t going to get it no matter how how true your responses are. It may be like trying to teach Latin to a cat.
…fire whom exactly? Name the names of the people you want to fire please.
I disagree. I wouldn’t have handled this project the way it was handled. Neither would you. But that is irrelevant to the point I made.
It was obvious I was talking to someone who thought it was possible to have “bug free software.” I was making a point to them, not making a point to you.
Indeed.
You are incorrect.
Indeed. Do you see me arguing with you?
Cool story bro.
Your blaming the problems with the website on the passing of the bill?
Who said I wanted to give them a pass? Not me.
I could imagine doing better. I know as well as you do the systematic failures that led to where we are. But those systematic failures are endemic in the software industry. I’ve cited Novapay. There are no end of big budget software failures that when you look into it almost always have the same causes. There is a problem with your industry. If you actually are part of the software industry you are part of the problem. Get your industry sorted out.
Words on the internet dude.
And Novapay was an Australian contractor that blew it. And INCIS was led by a US based contractor. This isn’t an isolated incident and don’t “blame it on the Canadians.”
The level of outrage from you guys over this is hilarious. After everything from Guantanemo Bay to Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq Clusterfuck and the Afghanistan boondoogle its a website that finally gets you to show a bit of emotion on the boards. Forget about the trail of dead bodies your country has produced over the last thirteen year and the billions wasted in the pursuit of the war on terror, but hey, some contractors screwed up a website and this is the worst president ever.
No, I’m claiming the system wasn’t adequately tested to ensure it was working properly. (I predict you’ll not wish to dispute this.)
No. The “magic formula” is to cause progress to be monitored in such a way that important deadlines are met.
Right - it was caused by a lack of proper follow-up, as Biden’s words make clear. In short: management incompetence.
The subject in question here is the ACA, especially the website. Who besides them should bear the responsibility for this? And note that Biden apologized, which implies that he feels some measure of responsibility.
“Zero changes” is quite silly here - all large (and even not-so-large) systems get changed as they develop. Which changes are you thinking were problematic? And if such existed, why was the project made live without first being made fully functional?
There certainly does need to be adequate funding. Do you feel that the website’s development budget was inadequate? If so, why was this not publicized?
And note that you can’t ensure much of anything if your approach is to simply assume that a complex project will be ready on time.
Thanks for your concern, but the ground I’m standing on seems to be supporting me quite nicely.