I’m pretty sure you can remember the last campaign, John. It was only a year ago.
“We were working 24/7, working in very, very rapid cycles, with very, very short deadlines and milestones. We were working in a very, very nimble hyper consumer focused way, all fused in this kind of maelstrom of pizza, Mountain Dew, and all nighters, and you know, idealism.”
- Tood Park, Chief Technology Officer at HHS.
Sounds like a great way to run the country.
I remember the campaign. I don’t remember Obamacare being the swing factor. Please remind me with a cite. Or don’t bother, because I’m sure there isn’t one.
FWIW, I am not any sort of IT guy and have zero experience managing IT projects of any size.
That said, IMO, the judges of success or failure are not those with experience running these projects. These people are the ones who can determine why the project was a success or failure. The people who determine whether the project was a success or failure are the users.
If you use any sort of product that you’re familiar with, you are the judge of whether it is successful in delivering what it’s being sold for, not some guy who is an expert in producing such things.
From that perspective it seems blindingly obvious that while healthcare.gov might ultimately be fixed, this launch has been a huge failure. Stats aside, any time the POTUS has to get up and reassure the nation that he is as mad as they are about how it went, that’s a failure. And so on.
The only thing that’s not obvious is why you would try to deny this. (I don’t recall this type of thing from you in other threads.)
Then, no, you don’t remember.
I’m not the only person here with no intention of spoonfeeding you, I’m sure.
I never said that the web site was built by cronies. Sometimes the best explanation is pure incompetence. I honestly haven’t even considered the relationships between the chosen companies and this administration. But it wouldn’t surprise me if it turned out that there were personal connections or the companies were big contributors to Obama or the Democrats, because that’s how business is done in Washington.
I have both defended and criticized Halliburton in the past. On this board, mostly defended because the attacks against it were kind of wingnutty, alleging the evil Dick Cheney running the show from behind the scenes and such. I remember when their ‘no-bid’ contracts were the subject of scorn here, and I pointed out that no-bid contracts aren’t unusual when there is only one contractor with the capabilities to do what’s needed.
Tell you what - go back in time and see if you can find anything nice I’ve had to say about big agriculture companies and their habit of getting protection and subsidies from the government - including from the Bush administration. Or for that matter, just about any other form of government protection and subsidy of big businesses. I have been a lifelong critic of this stuff, including when the Reagan Administration got ‘voluntary’ restrictions in auto imports from the Japanese.
I’ve been consistent about this: Big business likes big government. They like lots of regulations. They like it because they have the ear of government and therefore can twist those regulations to their benefit, freezing smaller players out of the market or putting burdens on them that effectively keep them from competing. Like other libertarians, I’m pro-market, but not pro-business. Liberals don’t seem to get the distinction.
My first experience with this was in my early 20’s when I was working for a small chemical manufacturer/research lab. Our provincial government (conservative) decided to ‘aid’ R&D by providing research grants. The big chemical firms grabbed up almost all the grant money, as the small guys didn’t have the resources to jump through all the hoops and we’re invited to the high-level meetings where the reps for the big companies helped the government to ‘understand’ the R&D needs of the province.
Then the big guys used that money to displace their own R&D money and used that money to undercut the prices of the small firms who had to maintain the costs of R&D out of their own pockets. The result was that innovation was hurt and the market made less dynamic. But the big companies agreed with the government that the program was a ‘success’. Remind you of anything (cough Solyndra)?
This is the major disconnect I see on the left; You guys claim to be all for the little guy and against big business, but you constantly advocate for policies that put business in bed with the government, resulting in higher profits for the people with connections and lower profits for the small guys. Then you whine about lobbyists, while your preferred policies guarantee more of them.
Hey, whatever happened to Obama’s promise to get rid of lobbyists? And how come his administration seems to have a revolving door going right back to Citibank, Goldman Sachs, and other big finance firms? GE receives the largest amount of money from the stimulus, and the head of the company becomes one of Obama’s advisors. GE then changes their corporate vehicle policy and buys thousands of Chevy Volts, helping the administration’s defense of their GM connections. Any bets on other benefits that might have flowed to these companies through their mutual back-scratching agreements with the government?
Lightsquared gives $30,000 to the Democrats, and on the same day begins lobbying for private access to the administration. Then what do you know, the FCC fast-tracks their wireless technology despite concerns about interference with GPS signals.
When Republicans do this, you guys howl and scream about it, and your candidates promise to ‘clean up Washington’. Then they come in and do the same thing or even more of it, and you stand silent. Or, you express disappointment that your current chosen one wasn’t as honest as you hoped and you vote for the next guy who proimises to clean it all up.
What you don’t ever seem to understand is that this is the nature of the beast. If you want the government regulating everything, it necessarily has to put them in bed with the industries they are regulating, because government doesn’t have the knowledge required to effectively regulate so much. The regulatory bodies have revolving doors between themselves and the industries they regulate. And that gives the most powerful capitalists more power.
So it will ever be. The only way to stop the corruption of centralized power is to stop centralizing power.
There is probably nothing in this, but if you want to start looking into this you might want to start here.
Look, it was kind of a stupid hijack to begin with, but if you can’t back it up with a cite, don’t blame me.
Ok, this part first. You must have missed some really dumb arguments I’ve pursued. And I’m losing this one, as the facts come in it looks worse and worse. Now that Obama says it will all be fixed by the end of November (which means end of December at the best) it’s looking pretty bad.
I can’t argue that the public opinion aspects of this as a failed rollout are true. In that respect it is a failure, in the opinion of those who want to use the website, and in the broader political sense, and…
RaftPeople, I’m going to concede because I didn’t have much to go on to begin with. You certainly can’t call the entire project a failure yet, but I don’t have much to argue in terms of the rollout. It may be a success for the contractor in some sense, but then someone in the government still failed to allow that in the first place. I disagree about some of your ideas about what project management and project managers do, and we can discuss that in more depth if you like, but it obviously isn’t going to help my case in the long run in terms of rollout failures.
As for my project management record, I didn’t describe it clearly to start, and you didn’t catch what my meaning was later. Most of my project management was in my own company as a partner with other small contractors, working in an industry niche with little competition over a period of about 10 years. There were less than 10 projects you’d probably consider of the scale necessary for this discussion, and they were all variations of an initial project we completed very successfully due to hard work and good fortune. We didn’t take on risky projects because it was a partnership and we had to agree that we were on very firm ground before signing the contracts. Otherwise, as an employee, and taking over projects already started and mismanaged I was as subject to the difficulties of project management as anyone else.
And BTW, I hate project management even though I do it well. There’s little room for creativity, and it’s stressful, and I had to wear a suit too often. That may be why I worked harder to get everything done on time and paid more attention to detail than I might have otherwise, I wanted those things to end.
You guessed wrong about the programming projects, I’ve done plenty of those small and large, but many were blue sky development and those have a great propensity for delays and failure.
I enjoyed the argument, but as you provide more details I find it harder to disagree with you, especially about the generalities, we actually share the same concepts of responsibility and quality. So congratulations, I don’t admit defeat easily most of the time, though I ought to do it sooner when I’ve gone off course.
You realize, I hope, that an excess of classy is a bannable offense?
And here’s some independent verification:
[QUOTE=Association of Black Princeton Alumni]
Toni McCall Townes-Whitley '85
Senior Vice President, Federal Civilian Agency Programs, CGI
…
First Lady Michelle Obama '85
[/quote]
There’s apparently another alternative, which is to wait and see if you develop a serious illness. If you do, then you buy insurance (apparently you cannot be denied on the basis of a pre-existing condition).
I wasn’t following this stuff until yesterday when I ran into my neighbor. His insurance has been cancelled since it does not cover maternity. He told me that there is no real enforcement mechanism for the penalty which is not that big anyway. He told me that he plans to go without insurance and just buy it if something serious develops.
I was looking online and apparently people like him are a serious concern. For the system to work properly, you need both sick and healthy people to sign up. If only sick people sign up, the system will not work since the premiums they pay in will not be anywhere near enough to cover the cost of their medical care.
As far as the web site goes, it obviously exacerbates the risk that the insurance market will fall apart. A lot of people probably expect penalties to be waived if they say “I tried to sign up but the web site wouldn’t let me.” Probably the same is true of enrollment deadlines.
You might think my neighbor would be annoyed at having his insurance cancelled, but he seems pretty happy about the situation. The money he is saving on premiums is far more than enough to cover routine doctor visits. And he doesn’t have to worry about what will happen if he gets very ill, since at that point he can just buy insurance. So he’s up $5 or 10k a year. Which is a pretty nice free lunch for him. Multiply that by enough people and it’s a big expensive problem.
So that’s what’s behind your new indignant decrying of Obama’s “crony capitalism” here? Just your own imagination, supported only by the word-count of your own rants?
IOW, nothing new here. When come back, bring facts. Relevant ones, please.
Charming as ever, I see. You might just want to go back and notice that I never said anything about the web site being built by cronies. I was talking about this administration’s ties to cronies in general, and the larger problem of Washington needing industry insiders to be able to function, and they will always steer legislation in a direction that benefits their industry. Another word for it is ‘regulatory capture’. And if you want cites for that, I can give them to you up the wazoo. But then, I think you already know this - at least when Republicans are in power.
Yes, Sam, we are all liberal hypocrites. Is it your contention that our moral failings are pertinent to the facts of the matter?
TriPolar, I appreciate the post, and it helps a little, but frankly you damaged your credibility.
Because you still think these pm details are “my ideas”, here is a very informative but summarized description of proj mgmt, the role of the PM, what they own, etc., there is a little menu in upper right that dives into a little more detail:
I said nothing of the sort. I made no comment about your morals or lack thereof. And I don’t think you are a hypocrite - just blind to the unavoidable nature of government.
Update: Almost 3 weeks now since the call for a ‘tech surge’, and the site is still completely broken. The administration is now backing off its claim that everything will be fixed by Nov 30, and are now saying that the site will work for ‘The large majority of people’. An interesting equivocation.
In the meantime, I’ve been reading some interesting stuff.
For you IT guys who know how to read status documents, have a gander at this: CGI August Status Report. Pay special attention to the ‘Open Risks’ section, but it’s all interesting. Three weeks before release they were still getting new requirements from the government and still writing the high level architecture documents and specifications.
One funny part was the admission in this document that the White House demo for the president was prepared in Adobe Captivate. I use that program a lot - it’s a great way to fake up a system that doesn’t exist. That they had to resort to a Captivate demo two weeks before public rollout is amazing.
Here’s a letter from David Cutler to Larry Summers in August 2010 calling out the many errors the administration was making. David Cutler is a Democrat, a health industry specialist, and someone who supported Obama and Obamacare. None of his advice was heeded.
An article in the Washington Post describing the many failures in implementing this law. Basically, the administration was totally focused on the politics of it all, and allowed that to dictate the implementation. It also shows that the errors some of us have been talking about here - putting political functionaries in charge of technical projects for example - were seen by others early on and the President was warned about it and chose to ignore the warnings.
Of course, Obama knew better:
You may ask, “So, this Nancy-Ann Deperle is the perfect choice for shepherding a huge technical project. What, is she a superstar engineering manager?” Uh, no. She’s a lawyer and a crony par excellence.
From NBC News:
See? This is how Washington works. You do a stint in an administration, then you leave and use your powerful connections to the levers of power to land on the boards of companies who tend to use that kind of power. Then, you cycle back into Washington as a ‘regulator’, overseeing the industries that grease your palm. Then, if you’re really lucky, you get to help draft a huge new law affecting those very companies - with their needs in mind, of course. I’m sure Nancy will soon be back in the loving embrace of those companies, sitting on some board or being an ‘advisor’ paid millions per year, because she’s the kind of person who knows how to ‘get things done in Washington’.
But sometimes reality gets in the way, and you realize that you’ve just been appointed to a job you have no qualifications for:
Anyway, the article goes on to highlight the problems with the web site and Obamacare in general - and they go right to the top. The biggest impediment to success was the White House itself. Some important facts from the article:
By 2011, DePerle was out, and it was already becoming apparent to anyone with a brain in the administration that the exchange project was in the weeds. Time to bring in a fix-it person, someone who could use extensive project management knowledge to right the ship and get it back on track! So, who did Obama appoiint to this critical function? Jeanne Lambrew. Who is she? Well, she’s a fellow at the Center for American Progress, which is nice. Gotta get those partisan bona fides in there. She’s also another policy wonk with no project management experience whatsoever.
The errors continue:
The earlier speculation in this thread about what went wrong was exactly right:
And then there’s this E-mail, sent on August 17, and widely distributed throughout the management chain, which has the following statuses:
FFM (the Federal Marketplace overall): 55% complete
Eligibility and Enrollment: 81% Complete
Financial Management: 14% Complete
Plan Management: 82% Complete
Technical Architecture: 69% Complete
Infrastructure and Operational Readiness: 51% Complete
So, a month and a half before public rollout, and they still hadn’t come close to finalizing the technical architecture???!!
This is what happens when a President and his advisors are all people with no experience in business, and who have spent their lives engaged in partisan politics. They see everything as a political battle, and don’t have a clue when it comes to actually executing their political plans. The article details in great length how the administration was largely driven by political concerns. They wouldn’t release a technical document for developers because they were afraid Republicans would use it against them. They appointed people to key project position not based on their project management experience, but on their credentials as loyal partisans and liberal policy expertise. Election cycles mattered more than engineering deadlines. Appeals for delay or were ignored because politics trumps everything.
If there was ever a lesson in why government should do as little as possible, this is it. Governments are uniquely unsuited to actually running things. Politics and management do not mix well. This administration is particularly bad in this regard.
Or as Larry Summers said about the White House to Peter Orszag at the Bombay Club one night, “We’re really home alone, Peter. I mean it. We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge."
And yet the state exchanges, which had far less instability in their requirements and far less attempts to sabotage them, are generally working well. Perhaps it’s only national, not state, governments that cannot do anything right? 
Another
Not sure what the smileys are for. I fake up systems for early UI analysis or to get a head start on training materials. In other words, it’s a good prototyping tool. It’s also very obviously not ‘real’. If Obama thought he was looking at a real web site, he’s an idiot.
In my company, if someone showed up at a final readiness review with a Captivate demo of software that was supposed to ship in 3 weeks, he’d be laughed out of the room. Then his manager would quickly find out why he felt the need to show a non functional prototype of a system that should have been fully functional, fully tested, and being prepared for delivery. But I imagine Obama and his crew were so inept they couldn’t tell the difference, or if they did, they couldn’t understand the implications.