The administration was legally bound - but they’re the ones who tied their own hands. You act like the hand of God decreed it, but the deadlines were baked into the same law that called for a portal in the first place. And of course, being legally bound hasn’t stopped Obama from pushing out the dates anyway, or telling insurance companies to sell illegal policies anyway.
When you’re looking at building one of the largest IT projects ever attempted, it’s sheer idiocy to set up the law’s implementation such that hard, irrevocable deadlines are only a couple of months away from the ship date of the project required for people to meet the deadline.
If they had listened to anyone with serious experience with large software engineering projects, they would have been told that schedule creep is likely, and a complete blow-out of the schedule is a distinct possibility. This is true of ALL large software projects, even if they are run correctly. Software is complex, and it doesn’t take too many surprises before you run into serious budget and schedule blowing problems. That’s why real project managers do risk analysis and come up with mitigation plans in advance for when things go in the weeds.
This would not have been hard to do. For example, they should have had proper tollgate reviews, and plans for cutting features or extending the delivery date if the tollgate reviews showed that progress was not on track. They should have had an early deliverable of a minimum-required-feature version of the portal a year ago, and plans in place to push the implementation of the rest of Obamacare out if that tollgate was missed. That way, even if the full-featured portal was delayed, they could have gone with the minimum-spec system until the other one was ready. And if the minimum-feature version was late, they would have been able to give everyone a year’s warning and pushed out the implementation of the law. Hell, they could have written the law so that the deadlines were based on X months from the point at which the portal was declared to be ready for business.
Then they should have used the minimum-feature portal as part of a phased rollout, picking a few compliant states as early adopters. This would not only have allowed them to test the software, but it would have allowed them to examine the impact of the law on a smaller population group before foisting on the entire country.
There are many other things you can do in these situations to mitigate risk. A responsible project management team would have had them in place. The Obama administration didn’t even have a proper project management team. Obama himself specifically made the choice to allow a political functionary to run the project, against the advice of his own economic advisors who told him he needed a proper engineering manager. Then when she left the job, David Cutler warned him to pick a proper manager, and Obama ignored the advice again and put another political functionary in the position.
And if you’re about to say that these types of procedures aren’t possible in a government-run project because of partisanship and political necessities, congratulations - you just helped make the point that governments shouldn’t be trying to do this stuff in the first place.
Over 90% of large government IT projects miss their release deadlines. About 40% of them fail completely and are never delivered at all. Yet the Obama administration decided to bet their entire health care plan and 1/6 of the economy on delivering a multi-year development project on schedule, and then refused to take any action (other than making it worse by adding requirements) when the engineering teams were sounding the warning months in advance of the rollout.
And amidst all this ignorance, hubris and fail, you somehow managed to blame Republicans. Well done.
The scope was ‘dramatically increased’ years ago. The states made their decisions known early on. There was plenty of time to revisit the engineering plan then, but they just assumed that somehow it would all work out.
Then the Obama administration chose to withhold requirements from the engineering teams until after the election, for fear that the details would be used against them in the election. Likewise, there was terrible communication between the various vendors because the administration chose to withhold key architecture diagrams from them for political reasons until after the election.
And one of the biggest scope expansions came late in the process, when the Obama administration suddenly tacked on a requirement that everyone had to create an account and log into the system before they could even request pricing, because they knew that the prices coming in from the insurers were going to cause ‘sticker shock’. They dumped that massive requirement on the developers just a couple of months before release.
“Mostly Working”? You have evidence of this? Because just last week Congress heard testimony that the back-end systems, including payment processing, hadn’t even been started. The estimate was that the entire project was only about 60-70% complete. The insurance companies are still reporting errors in the data they are getting. The entire portal was down for an hour and a half yesterday morning.
And by the way, ‘mostly working’ is a terrible metric. It should have been ‘mostly working’ a year ago. It should have been completely working six months before the deadline so that they had time to do load testing, security testing, and fix bugs. So no, having something ‘mostly’ working two months after the deadline is not pretty good. It’s a total fail.
And there has still been no proper integration testing, no security audit (another major security flaw was found a couple of days ago by happenstance), and probably the only reason the whole system is hanging together better now than it was in October is because most people have already given up trying to use it so volume is way down.
I love how Obama is now framing success as “Working for most of the people most of the time.” That formulation will allow him to claim success no matter how many visible failures there are, because he can always claim that the failures are part of the 20% instead of the 80% - even if 3/4 of the transactions fail. So long as they don’t release the real numbers, it’s very hard to tell from the outside where the system is working for 80% of the people or only 50%.
And of course, if the insurance companies are getting bad data, missing fields in forms, accidental cancellations, double entries, and other issues that have been reported, Obama will just blame them.