Saturday, August 02, 2014
Healthcare.gov Debacle
The federal Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan
investigative agency of Congress, reports that the Healthcare.gov debacle was
caused by management failures.
Just as I suspected.
The GAO finding was reported in an AP article that appeared
in the July 31 issue of The Boston Globe.
GAO was quoted as stating that the managers responsible for
the project lacked “effective planning or oversight practices” for the
development of the web page. It found
that “the administration kept changing the contractors’ marching
orders….creating widespread confusion” and that “changes were ordered in
seemingly arbitrary fashion, including 40 times when government officials did
not have the initial authority to incur additional costs.”
Failure of large information technology projects is common
in both the public and private sectors.
The main reason, in my opinion, is that managers have the mistaken
notion that computer projects can only be understood by computer experts. They therefore neglect to decide and declare
in specific terms what the project is intended to do and how it is to operate. Then as the project proceeds and they learn
how the final product will function, they order changes that disrupt and
confuse the planning process – decisions that should have been made before
planning started.
Project management remains a large blind spot in the field
of administration. Let us hope that the
Healthcare.gov debacle becomes a learning experience.
