Posted on 10/20/2013 2:10:29 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
The Department of Health and Human Services said Sunday it was bringing in outside help to resolve some of the technical woes that have beset the federally run insurance exchanges, which the agency acknowledged “has not lived up to the expectations of the American people.”
“We are committed to doing better,” agency officials said in a blog post that also said that “our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve healthcare.gov.”
Spokespeople for the agency didn’t immediately respond to questions seeking more information about the development, which it is billing as a “tech surge.”
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.wsj.com ...
One can only hope...
My experience in this sort of thing is nil, but I am
a student of history and attempts to standardize
humans never brings any good.
Obamacare makes Hillarycare look positively workable,
You’d have thought Kerry could have at least given
him some tips...
Having done a lot of project management I can tell you with a lot of certainly, that throwing bodies to fix a dysfunctional implementation plan will fail badly. Throwing bodies that actually do work may help if the plan is solid and you simply need resources, but if the project execution plan is broken, as this one is, it will only get much worse. Me I’m hoping for an epic failure.
We agree.
Witness our first attempt at it: The standardization of firearms, followed by successes in standardizing railroads, telegraph signals, and then manufacturing in general (Henry Ford being the most prominent example). Standardizing data is the next logical step, and it escapes me why this has not been undertaken before now. We've made half-hearted stabs at the concept, but .. what we need is a Data Revolution, like the Industrial Revolution was.
I would have thought that as the internet matures
standardization would naturally develop.
Although this can conjure up images of the tower
of Babel, it would seem a logical step.
Glad to see Ted Cruz is the most important man in DC. Outside advice is probably; "Add more servers".
It won't be fixed because I'm not there. I've written train wrecks, so I know how to fix them.
No, it didn't.
Well, parts did, like HTML, XML, HTML5, and the like. But the underlying programming did not.
Then too, standardization of parts and manufacturing
is less than two hundred years old or so.
I wonder what will happen when it can be applied to
a nanoscale.
...I’ve written train wrecks, so I know how to fix them...
lol
“our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the team and help improve healthcare.gov.”
Scrub in with the team.
Don’t ya just love those medical metaphors.
I hope they all wash up first.
I do in house software, so my perspective isn’t the same as big team kind of software writing. However, as I go back through my old code, I always find a lack of documentation and places where I haven’t a clue what I was doing. I would suspect in something as massive as Ocare, the new team will have to take several steps back just to figure out what the hell is going on, all to understand a failed product. 50/50 they would want to rewrite parts from scratch.
Who pays for this rewrite, by the way? Medicaid enrollees???
Let TIm Cook and Zuckerberg take a look at it. There’s a reason they didn’t want this job. But now 0bozo is calling in his chips with an all hands on deck SOS. I wonder if they will honestly tell him that the design and architecture suck, and to start over..
“”Having been through one or two of these myself, the new team will uncover so many fundamental flaws in the architecture that they will require at least 2-3 years of redesign, plus another year (at least) of testing prior to roll-out. Add in bureaucratic delays and you have a recipe for continuing disaster.””
Hope you’re right!!!! We’ll have front row seats to the unraveling of obozo!!!! We might get to see him taken out of the WH in a straight jacket! A dream come true.
Fundamentally flawed. Solution, throw more people on the job. We had a saying where we worked. You can’t take 9 women and make a baby in a month. Pull the friggin plug.
For those of us who predicted this, it's right on schedule.
ObamaCare is exhibiting classic symptoms of the Death March:
In project management, a death march is a project where the members feel it is destined to fail and/or requires a stretch of unsustainable overwork. The general feel of the project reflects that of an actual death march because the members of the project are forced to continue the project by their superiors against their better judgment.
The fields whose project management practice first named these related phenomena are software development and software engineering. Other fields have since recognized the same occurrence in their own spheres and have adopted the name.
Death marches of the destined-to-fail type usually are a result of unrealistic or overly optimistic expectations in scheduling, feature scope, or both, and often include lack of appropriate documentation or relevant training and outside expertise that would be needed to do the task successfully. The knowledge of the doomed nature of the project weighs heavily on the psyche of its participants, as if they are helplessly watching themselves and their coworkers being forced to torture themselves and march toward death. Often, the death march will involve desperate attempts to right the course of the project by asking team members to work especially grueling hours (14-hour days, 7-day weeks, etc) or by attempting to "throw (enough) bodies at the problem", often causing burnout.
Often, the discomfort is heightened by the knowledge that "it didn't have to be this way," that is, that if the company wanted to achieve the goal of the project, it could have done so in a successful way if it had been managed competently (such as by devoting the obviously required resources, including bringing all relevant expertise, technology, or applied science to the task rather than just whatever incomplete knowledge a few employees happened to know already). Patent underresourcing is especially offensive at a large corporation with sufficiently deep pockets; at least at small companies, a gap between resources and needs is understandable, but at large, profitable, cash-rich companies, underresourcing is not a necessity and thus feels to most workers like stupidity. Business culture pressures, such as the long-noted phenomenon of corporations pursuing short-term maximization of profits via cost cutting or avoidance that is damaging to long-term best interest, may play a role in addition to mere incompetence.
Among the most infamous death march projects are the Denver Airport baggage handling system and WARSIM, a U.S. Army wargame.[1][2][3] The latter project was originally called WARSIM 2000 at its inception in the early 1990s. A decade after its original scheduled delivery date, WARSIM has yet to support a single Army training exercise, but is still being funded, largely to vindicate those who conceived of the system and defended it over the lifetime of its development. The WARSIM schedule slipped many times. Moreover, WARSIM has a clumsy architecture that requires enough servers to fill a small room, while earlier "legacy" wargames run efficiently on a single standard desktop workstation.
The term "death march" in this context was discussed at length in Edward Yourdon's book Death March: The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving 'Mission Impossible' Projects (ISBN 0130146595), which has a second edition simply titled Death March (ISBN 013143635X). Yourdon's definition: "Quite simply, a death march project is one whose 'project parameters' exceed the norm by at least 50 percent." [4]
See also[]
Exactly what I was thinking. Now to see how long it takes before they make the classic mistake of starting over from scratch instead of fixing the existing code.
Bookmark
So, he’s bringing in the “techies” and the “best and brightest.”
You didn’t have “techies?” You didn’t have the “best and the brightest?” So why the H not?
That’s what happens when you hire your friends instead of the pros.
Dumb bass.
Drudge has “Emergency surgery” headline.
No. Bring in the DEATH PANEL and put this dog out of its misery.
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