I’m assuming you have no experience with government contracts.
Ok, so you’ve never had a project that you managed from the start get delayed. That’s makes you the only person on the planet in that category. Well done.
Next question: do you honestly believe that going live with a system is a “minor milestone”?
elucidator, this is an easy one for you to check into regarding TriPolar’s claims of expertise. Going live or placing a system into production is “the” major milestone. You can google it easy enough. It should make you wonder why TriPolar isn’t aware of something so basic to managing software projects.
Here are examples from a quick google if you don’t trust me or other posters:
Example #1
"For example, if you’re rolling out a new web-site, you might have three major milestones:
Create new design;
Migrate content to the new design;
Publish new web-site."
Example #2
"Major Milestones for Software Projects
Milestones are classified as major and minor. The major milestones give visibly or progress to people external to the project. For example, project sponsors and customers. The table provides a set of classical major software project milestones
-
Concept approval - Feasibility studies and basic system concepts have been approved by management and the project is authorized to proceed to detailed requirements definition.
-
Requirements review - Requirements specifications are complete, correct, approved and suitable for input to design.
… -
Operational readiness review The software product has passed acceptance testing and is suitable for deployment in its target production environment.
-
Product operational - The software is in use in its target operational environment."
Example #3 -
Domain Name selected and registered
-
RFP completed
-
Vendor selected
-
Site content completed
-
Beta site released for testing
-
Production website deployed
So TriPolar, how do you explain that your view of major and minor milestones is completely wrong according to everyone else that manages projects? How is it possible we can trust your expertise but on this point which is black and white you are simply wrong?
It’s easy to post opinions. I don’t know who those people are, and I don’t why you keep digging yourself into a hole. Why can’t you complete projects on time? Is it because you consider a deadline to be a minor milestone? You haven’t presented anything to support your case. From one of your examples “Production website deployed”, well it was. I don’t see anything to back up your claim that this one didn’t meet that milestone. Is that how you manage anyway? Those are ambiguous milestones that are meaningless. A real milestone is a date and some performance specifications. And that would be performance specifications made in writing, not someone’s opinion of what they should be. Maybe you have to learn to be specific and your projects won’t be late.
You are frequently claiming there are some kind of industry standards but your proof is nothing but unattributed quotes. I know standards, I’ve served on two ANSI committees, real standards aren’t just made up. “Industry standard” is usually a phrase made up to justify the lack of adherence to an actual standard, but not always. I’ve done analyses of actual industry practices to establish an industry standard, I didn’t bother googling (because it didn’t exist) and I didn’t rely on opinion pieces.
Your entire argument is built out of thin air. Show me the date and performance criteria that haven’t been met here. You don’t even understand why faulty products are taken live, so I’ll try to explain it to you. Businesses are in the business of making money. If a business has a contract that specifies a go live date without performance criteria and it will take a loss if it doesn’t meet that date it will do anything to go live, even if the product is virtually unusable.
You can keep on attempting to narrow the definition of what you are calling a failure until I have to admit that it did fail under those criteria, but they’re still things you are making up.
I hope you realize that the World Series isn’t over even though both teams have already failed to reach milestones.
I have 30+ years in the financial services industry. I have audited IT functions, including their SDLC, and I have run large projects of many types. TriPolar’s explanations are incredible and barely coherent. RaftPeople’s explanations are absolutely consistent with my experience and knowledge. Frankly, they’re pretty textbook. When TriPolar says something like, “Your entire argument is built out of thin air. Show me the date and performance criteria that haven’t been met here,” it is so nonsensical that, well…I’m speechless. He might just as well insist we show that the Titanic’s ownership said that the ship sinking was not desired–in writing and prior to the launch–before we can call the voyage a failure. TriPolar is stunningly wrong, in virtually everything he’s offered. It’s actually pretty funny.
Just saying, so RaftPeople knows there’s at least one person reading along who gets his self-evident point. TriPolar’s “argument” is pretty amusing, and I find his claims as to experience and credentials to be–well, I’ll just say curious, given the forum.
Ok, another opinion. Do you have any facts?
Post 151 covered it pretty well, I thought. Keep reading that one until it sinks in, because there’s no way I’m getting into a fruitless exchange with you, given how yours has gone with RaftPeople. I have been on the other end of this kind of nonsense too many times on this board. Have fun…
If Raft had some evidence for his claim that the vast majority of transactions don’t work currently then he might be on to something, but neither he nor you are offering evidence of that. As to your Titanic analogy, it’s way off base. You are predicting that the Titanic will hit an iceberg and sink halfway across the Atlantic because it’s late leaving the port. The Titanic was a failure because it did sink, this website is improving daily and maybe can be recovered. Maybe it won’t, and at that point I’ll happily call it a failure. And I’ll state that you have correctly predicted that failure based on some obvious indicators. But either way both of you have shown a marked ignorance of business. I’ll state it once again, failure is determined in the long run. If you want to dissect an application down into small enough pieces you’ll find some things that can be called failures, but nobody will care if the application as a whole is a success.
Thanks. I think mostly it helps people like elucidator that are trying to determine what to believe.
Project management 101. You know there is a body of knowledge considered best practice, right? That’s where this info comes from.
Yes they deployed a website.
Dang you got me, I guess that means Healthcare.gov is an example of a perfect success. How could I have missed something so obvious.
Let’s see:
1 - You’ve never had a delayed project in 40 years of experience
2 - You aren’t aware of standard project management principles and consider going live with a system to be a “minor milestone”
3 - You think a 70% failure rate over 3 weeks is not a failure
4 - You think that going live with a system that fails 70% of it’s transactions doesn’t cause “chaos” and doesn’t cost extra money
5 - You think just deploying a website is all it takes to consider the job done, even if the system doesn’t work
And you want me to believe you’ve served on two ANSI committees?
You’re making it very tough to believe anything you post.
I guess I won’t bother to mischaracterize your statements in kind. I’ve narrowed the definitions of my career to suit my argumanet just as you are narrowing the definition of failure to suit your argument. The difference is that the ACA website is the subject of this debate, not my career. I’m not going to keep playing this game (I’m in no mood after the outcome of a game last night). You are using a criteria applied to project manager performance, not project performance. I stand by statement, failure is something irreparable. And if you look back through my comments I called this failure from the outset based on the important factor of how much money was spent, or rather wasted on this website. When you come up with the performance criteria for this website I will likely have no choice but to call the rollout phase a complete complete failure. I’ll go right ahead now and say it’s also a failure in terms of public opinion, and in that respect it may doom this whole project.
But back to project management, project managers often find themselves in the unfortunate position of attempting to carry out the impossible, specs that are ambiguous and get interpreted at the end of a project, a lack of resources necessary for completetion, changing goalposts, even natural disasters on occasion get in the way. Those are some of the circumstances where I did have to delay projects, because as I said they weren’t projects that I originated, I was an employee and had to try and fulfill the requirements set by others. It’s quite easy to avoid those traps, but businesses often don’t do that all the time. I did when I was a small business owner/project manager. I had to because I didn’t have the resources to survive an ambiguous spec allowing someone else to consider something a failure after the fact. The software business is very competitive, and companies take on anything they can hoping it all works out in the end even though the spec is nothing but a set of guesses. The project manager will likely get scapegoated even though he had no control over the circumstances. You have my sympathies if you find yourself in that position.
Now in this case I think it’s posssible the contactor will be able to show they performed according to their contract. Maybe they haven’t and I hope they get their pants sued off, but that’s not the way it usually turns out. If they can show they’ve met the requirements of the contract, they’ll get paid, way more than they deserve, and no businessman will call them a failure. In business terms success and failure are different words for profit or loss.
Thanks for the argument, but all we are doing is arguing semantics. I’m hoping this waste of money website can be recovered, and the political roadblocks can be cleared, and this whole healthcare system can be fixed so that it becomes something useful. I’m sure others are hoping to see it all fail in the end, and I’m not sure but it sounds like you are rooting for that eventual failure. Maybe not, maybe you’re just trying to win an argument through parsing of terms for some reason. And I’ll say that you could win this argument easily if you come up with some actual specs that apply. I have to admit that this project has the smell of failure about it, it has all the signs of mismanagement, misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance about it. But if it were my project I’d never let an odor substitute for actual criteria. Why don’t you just gather some facts and make me concede, it sounds like it would be easy.
Sure it happens, but if you have people with experience on similar projects to the one being built they won’t differ wildly like the example you gave.
When you put a person or people in charge of a project like this, part of the choosing process is making sure they have experience on similar projects and that they were successful.
That is probably the single most important step of the entire project, finding the right person/people with the right experience (with successes) to manage it.
If we weren’t on a message board and you felt the success of the project was important, the process would be you looking at candidates history, descriptions of projects, how they were run, how the manager handled various issues. You would talk to the CEO’s and CFO’s that had a stake in those projects. You would talk to some of the resources used on the projects. You would talk to your own trusted people in your network you’ve built up over the decades and probably have a neutral expert help you whittle down these choices.
Then you would be placing your trust in that person/people to deliver, but you would also monitor it and ask detailed questions about status.
At some point a non-technical person has to trust the people they’ve put in charge of the project. That’s why finding the right people is so incredibly important.
Having said that, it’s a pretty low bar to know that 2 weeks of testing on a project this size is so completely inadequate that there is just about 0% chance of the thing working.
OK, so the deadline is Nov 30 to get this up and running. That’s a red line, and if it’s crossed, Obama will bomb the offices of HHS.
Seriously, though, I’m perfectly happy to give him that timeframe to fix this. It sounds like it could be realistic, but I hope this is a date determined by the technical aspects, and not the political ones.
Unfortunately, the haters won’t though. If there is a single case of a single person having a less than perfect experience, they will point at it like Donald Sutherland In Invasion of the Body Snatchers and scream, “Failure!”
It isn’t going to be wonderful in any sort of spectacular fashion, any really good plan had no hope of passage. Of course they wanted to create a swift and graceful race horse, they are lucky the Republicans let them make a three legged goat with mange.
Anyone who loudly proclaims that now their child can get medical care so they can live will be advised that a life of government dependence isn’t worth living anyway. Take two cyanide and make an appointment with your local Potter’s Field. If your child was worth saving, you’d have the money to do it. It’s clearly God’s Will, as reflected by the sacred laws of the Free Market, blessings and peace be upon it.
Probably. It’s politics. And Obama can point to the millions of people who did have a great experience, if those exist.
Those are all of the things a PM is responsible for managing.
1 - Specs
The “specs” get created under the management of the PM. If you have ambiguous specs that create a serious problem that is on you the PM.
2 - Lack of Resources
Once again, that is the job of the PM to manage the availability of resources, find ways around problems, etc. That is exactly the reason a PM exists in the first place. If it’s just not possible to get around the constraint then either cut functionality or delay going live.
3 - Changing Goalposts
Again, PM job 101 - manage the damn project. Don’t allow requirements/functionality to be added or indicate the launch must be delayed to accommodate the new work. That is exactly your job.
4 - Natural Disasters
They happen. The correct answer is to not go live because the natural disaster prevented you from being ready to go live. Again PM 101.
I don’t think you are even aware of the role of a project manager, this is from wiki, an easy resource to find:
“A project manager is the person responsible for accomplishing the stated project objectives.”
The project manager doesn’t “originate” a project. The PM manages the project. The objectives/goals come from the project sponsor (typically a business executive, CEO, CFO, etc.).
You may want to get informed about this topic before you make any other statements about it. You don’t seem to actually even know the basic details about project management, the role of PM’s etc.
Contractors and contracts have absolutely nothing to do with this.
The responsibility for the success of this project lies somewhere in the US govt.
No we aren’t arguing semantics.
I’m ridiculing your absurd position that this launch was not a failure.
Because I’m pointing out how absurd your claims are that means I don’t want them to fix the system?
What kind of logic is that?
Let me be crystal clear:
1 - I hoped it would work from the start
2 - I hope they get the system working
3 - I voted for Obama
4 - I am pro-healthcare “do something”, but have not invested any time into figuring out if this is a good program or not
5 - I don’t let politics cloud my judgement about whether computer systems work or not
I know you need specs to determine whether a public system with 30% success of transactions is a failure or not.
The rest of us don’t.
Quick question: How did you get the 30% figure? AFAIK, the administration has only released the number of people who created accounts, not the number of people who actually signed up thru the exchanges. Without that last number, there is no way to determine % success rate.
Or, was that just a hypothetical in your argument?
One place I’ve seen the number is this company that tracks users on the internet and performs statistical analysis:
https://blog.compete.com/2013/10/15/obamacare-enrollment-stats/
And this is from the guy they called in to fix the system:
“As it is, Zients claimed that 90 per cent of website visitors can successfully create an account on the site, but conceded that actually applying for an insurance plan was a ‘volatile’ process in which only 30 per cent succeed.”
OK. At any rate, I think we can assume that the number is not good, else the administration would be advertising it in the way they advertise the number of people who created accounts (a number that doesn’t mean a whole lot).
You know anybody who can get health insurance now who couldn’t before? I certainly do. Several, in fact. Know any mothers who sleep better at night knowing that their children are covered under their insurance? You’d almost have to, but they may not have spoken to you about it.
Now that this thing is done, I imagine some of the stalwart ideologues of the Republican Party, who have steadfastly refused to participate in state run exchanges may see the advantages in a pragmatic and bi-partisan approach. As well as those who walked away from offering Medicaid to the uninsured, one need not be all that well to vote.
I don’t see any real chance that this whole lumbering apparatus will be dismantled because the web site doesn’t work. So, what’s to “advertise”?
I thought Obama couldn’t possibly win election in the first place. I thought even this lame ass parody of single payer insurance couldn’t overcome the hysterical Republican opposition.
I’m a pessimist, I really like being wrong.