Or in the real world, they get released from their contracts. When private contracting companies, like the one that I own, fail to deliver on a regular basis, they no longer have new opportunities to deliver with new clients. Of course, political connections can and often do supersede this reality.
I agree however that this project cannot be called a failure simply because the launch was a disaster. They should be in recovery mode now, my favorite time to come in. The bar has been set low and even the smallest successes can be declared as huge victories by a project sponsor eager for any good news. I expect that good news to be called out triumphantly over the next week or so.
Well, that would be dumb. The Pubbies challenge is to find a way to keep this news hot, hot, hot. Which is hard to do when nothing much happens. What are they gonna do, run screaming with the headline “Day 3! And STILL not totally fixed!! Oh, the humanity!..”
Now, if Daryl Eyesore can find a way to connect this to Benghazi…
Yes, any time a project fails to meet its initial launch date with the specified quality, management says “Well, I guess we tried, but this is a failure and we’ll just stop work and write off years of work.” That almost never happens. Somebody gets fired, someone doesn’t earn their bonus, but they make an effort to salvage the value and deliver late. If they do eventually deliver (which doesn’t always happen), the project doesn’t live out the rest of its existence as “oh yeah, that investment that’s making money for us now, too bad it’s a failed project.”
Republicans, tell the truth here, were you ever really NOT going to say this project was a ‘total failure’ regardless of the outcome?
If it succeeds, it moves America further along the path to a collectivist nightmare, the same sort of thinking that has turned Canada into a smoking ruin. And if it fails, which it must, its even worse, because it will be really really bad. Hell, I don’t know, ask them, and good luck!
And this just in, by way of the nihilistic scoundrels/our good friends at DailyKos
(No, I don’t know what a punch list is…)
From here it looks like the tighty rightys are pivoting to other issues already, since it is really hard to keep this at the top of the news cycle. So, we’ll see. Only time will tell.
You’re still missing the point. We’re not criticizing them for being late. We’re criticizing them for being totally irresponsible in the way they managed the project.
What should have happened is that when the first signs appeared that the portal was at risk of not delivering on time, there should have been exception reviews that identified mitigation strategies. Those strategies should have included rolling out a minimum viable portal and deferring some of the fancier features, delaying the entire project (and announcing the delay early so that, for example, insurance companies wouldn’t start cancelling people’s policies). At that point they could also have looked at whether bringing in more people would help, etc.
The schedule should also have included months of system level testing at a minimum. Shipping without doing this testing should never have been an option.
If they had followed these procedures and the result was that the rollout date of Oct 1 had been pushed to Jan 1 six months ago, the worst you would have heard from me was, 'Wow, a delay. Who couldn’t see that coming?" But that’s about it. Because software often ships late - especially when government does it. Then, about 90% of projects ship late. That’s nothing new.
But what happened here was that the adminitration refused to budge on either the features or the release date of the software. That leaves only one place to slip and that’s quality. Then, they compounded their error by eliminating the testing phase from the schedule in order to ship on time. That’s unconscionable.
Then, to make it even worse, they didn’t do critical load testing until a week or two before the project shipped, guaranteeing that there would be no time to fix any problems uncovered by the test.
Then, when the tests failed, they just released the software to the public anyway.
That’s what happened. It’s not just that the project was late - it’s that the project was incompetently managed and unethically foist on the public. Then the administration proceeded to lie about the problems. In fact, they lied about the problems from day 1, repeatedly responding to questions about the project by claiming that it was running smoothly with no problems.
They had to know this was not true - months before release they had a meeting with health care execs who expressed alarm at the state of the system and asked the administration to consider a pilot program or a phased rollout before foisting the whole thing on the entire country. The administration ignored them, and continued to tell congress and the public that everything was on track.
This is the kind of behavior that would get you fired. I might be forgiven for letting a project get out of control, especially if it was a hard management problem in the first place, and if I did my duty and reported problems to upper management as they were uncovered and disclosed the risks of not meeting various tollgates and milestones.
What I would never be forgiven for would be opening my company up to embarrassment and damages by lying about the state of the project to management, then skipping testing to meet schedule, then authorizing a release of the software even though I had solid evidence that it was riddled with critical bugs that would make it totally unusable.
Stop work and write off years of work? You lose credibility when you imply someone said something that they didn’t say or imply.
The point is simple: industry standard terms would call this launch a failure. When that happens you don’t give up, you try to fix it. But that doesn’t remove the failure, it still happened.
I’m not a Republican and I am philosophically pro-healthcare “do something”, but i have not really looked at this program to see if I agree or disagree with any parts of it.
I don’t want to be battling over semantics, if what you want to call a project is the whole concept of “HealthCare.gov”, which I would instead call a “product” or perhaps a “service” or more generically “an application” I think you’d find us in agreement. I believe with the resources of government the HealthCare.gov web application will at some point be more or less functional and “alright.”
But there’s also another concept of “project” that is different from just the application. A project has a timeline, it has deliverables etc. A project that is properly planned will have, in its timeline, extensive time for integration testing, user acceptance testing, load/stress testing etc. Then there will usually be different rounds of testing where the system is opened to users in limited release.
Any project that doesn’t include those things, and is a project involving a good bit of money and resources, that’s a poorly planned project from day one. That software project in fact was “built to fail” by the project planners. I don’t know if that is what happened here, but if none of that stuff was included in the project timeline from the onset I can guarantee you with 100% no doubt a PM at Microsoft or Apple or Google that created a project plan 1.5-2 years in advance that included no planned testing or such (or only planned to test a week before launch) would very likely be fired just for submitting that plan, and the firing would have happened way back in the planning stage. Because technology companies of that clout would immediately question how a supposed professional PM could have been so stupid as to formally submit a project plan that included no testing or no testing until the final week of the project. It’s simply unthinkable and would be talked about in shock by people who knew of it around the office for years afterword.
Any project that at least included that stuff, but then the actual project as it was developed ran out of time to do any meaningful testing and then delivered a non-functional project would be considered to have failed. It’s highly likely the original project planning team or PM would be removed and either a new project (“a remediation project”) to fix all the problems would be started or they might try to take up the reins of the existing project. I’d be very surprised if the HealthCare IT contractor they’ve announced recently that is taking over this task isn’t creating spec for a brand new project (at least in their terms) with specific deliverables/timeline to remediate this disaster.
Right, and giving some of the people defending HealthCare.gov some credit I think it’s at least possible they confuse the phrase “project is a failure” with the same concept as “that means HealthCare.gov will never work.” Sort of like if the first Saturn V launch ended in huge explosion on the launchpad and revealed fundamental design flaws that simply could not be fixed, most likely the entire Saturn V program would have been canceled and NASA would have had to start with an entirely new rocket design.
I don’t think anyone is saying that’s what happened with HealthCare.gov. But what I think some people don’t understand is you can consider a specific project to have “failed” while you still eventually get the underlying product/system/application fixed/launched properly. In a private company, if a product like HealthCare.gov had gone down the same way I imagine the project would have been called a failure and then they would start planning the remediation. Once that was all done I’d expect higher ups to have a meeting where they talked about “why did this project fail etc.”
Missing deadlines is different from this, and there might be follow up meetings about why deadlines were missed if they happened, but people would probably not call the project itself a failure. But where the product is so bug ridden as to be essentially non-functional then it’s really hard to imagine in a private company there wouldn’t be meetings after the fact asking “how could we have failed so badly on our initial pass at this? How did the project get planned so poorly? How could we have shipped software with no testing?”
Yes we are agreeing a lot and just differing in the terms. There were a lot of major fuck-ups in the management and implementation of this project, product, service, or whatever, but only time will determine whether it is a failure as a whole or what parts. I have no problem considering Kathleen Sibelius a failure at her job also, and I don’t give Obama any points either. But from a strictly business aspect this isn’t that much worse than many cases in both the public and private sector, and it is primarily a distraction. We should be much more concerned about how well this will work once it’s brought up to the functional specs (if there are any), and the amount of money that’s been obviously wasted than the management screw-ups which are probably correctable, and certainly can be avoided in the future (even though it’s unlikely that they will be avoided).
I’m not trying be particularly snarky here either. The problem is that these things don’t fit into neat little categories. There are failures, and then there are FAILURES. Sometimes heads will roll, and sometimes all will be forgotten in the end. There aren’t any particular rules for these circumstances because fixing the problems and moving forward will be the top priorities. Recrimination and the like happens long term, based on the long term results.
No. Contrary to what you imagine, a failed project means the plug’s been pulled on it because it didn’t deliver. HealthCare.gov has mostly failed to deliver, but the plug probably will never be pulled on it.
Ironically, as a supporter of AHA, I have to say if this happened in a private company, I would call this a ‘failing’ project and guess that it would fail within the year. And rightfully so. The management should not merely be fired, they should be caned. But this project has powerful support and massive resources, so that’s probably not going to happen.
Be as snarky as you want, the industry completely disagrees with you.
Are you trying to say you have 40 years experience building large software systems and you disagree that the standard term for this launch is “failure”?
This is almost as absurd an idea as the 500 million lines of code.
In the world I work (enterprise systems for public and private companies typically in the consumer products industries) they don’t wait for “long term results” to figure out if your complete disaster of a project should get you a gold star.
If you are the project manager and you screw things up this bad you typically don’t get a 2nd chance, but you may still have opportunities with less responsibility or magnitude, depending on the circumstances.
Why would you classify this launch as a failure? So far all we know is that it has some problems that need fixing, and a lot of them have been fixed already, people are using it and getting insurance through it. It’s just another buggy website at this point. If the deadline arrived and there was no website, that might be a failure. This one can’t be called that yet. And I don’t get paid for pointing at problems and declaring them failures, I get paid for fixing problems and turning projects into successes.
Really? All the enterprise systems from your company are completely bug free? They decide that the project is a disaster because there are problems with the rollout? That’s not the real world, and it doesn’t make sense. Companies don’t like to admit failure under any circumstances and do what they can to salvage projects that have problems. Otherwise the company is considered a failure itself. The business of business is making money, and it takes an immense disaster that results in major losses before anything is considered a disaster or failure. Odds are this consulting company has given raises and promotions to most of their management for bringing in tons of money, and those guys may be scape-goating a few minor players, but unless they get hit big time by the government (which is unlikely to happen because they’ve probably fulfilled the terms of a poorly constructed contract) then it’s a major success for them. If you want to take political shots at the administration for this then I don’t blame you. I’m pissed off about the money that was wasted, and pretty much every other government contract like this. But you still don’t have a basis for calling it a failure. There’s a long term goal to provide the means for people to purchase insurance through an exchange that will reduce the costs of healthcare. If that goal is not met in the long run you can call it a failure and a disaster, and I’ll join you. Until then it’s just Chicken Little declaring that the sky is falling. In real business there’s often someone like that complaining about the contracters, sometimes for good reason, but certainly not always. If you were complaining about your own company’s projects that way you’d find your opportunities limited because you have to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
You didn’t answer my question: do you have 40 years (or any experience) building large software systems?
Because it didn’t work and needs to get fixed.
The guy in charge of fixing it says:
“The HealthCare.gov site is fixable. It will take a lot of work, and there are a lot of problems that need to be addressed.”
Again: do you have any experience building large software systems?
The launch of this system is categorized as a failure by people in the industry, that build these types of systems for a living.
Did I ever say anything about being bug free? Nope. So what’s the point of making that statement?
Yes, people that build these systems call it a failure to try to go live and fail.
Again, it doesn’t mean you don’t fix it, but fixing it doesn’t remove the failure that already happened.
I don’t work in IT, so not sure how to evaluate commentary about lines of code etc. But apparently, not only does the federal site have problems on the front end with registration etc, but far bigger ones on the back end with transmission to the insurance companies. Throwing this out there for y’all to analyze (from Health Care Policy and Market Review)
I guess I need to be clearer. I have 40 years experience with large software systems and small ones too. The last 25 years were spent in the healthcare industry (at least when I wasn’t pursuing other dreams which I can afford to do because I made so much money at it).
Failures are things that can’t be fixed.
Obviously I have far more experience than you because I’m not rushing to evaluate the state of a software product based on media sound bites. I haven’t heard anyone in the industry call this a failure, nor do I see a reason why anyone would unless they’re just trying to acquire the contracts themselves or have a political agenda.
Because you aren’t offering anything but polemics, without describing a standard for the claims of failure that you make. I’ve stated mine, a failed project is one that irreparable. Your standard seems to be that if someone doesn’t like it then it’s a failure, and I would suggest your company has produced nothing but failures by your measure.
It has only failed in your opinion. I work in the healthcare software industry and haven’t heard a word about this being a failure from any professional. People with experience don’t declare a winner or loser until the game is over, and this one isn’t over.
Again, by that standard your own company has produced numerous failures, unless you’re going to claim the products have been perfect from the moment of their release.