Healthcare.gov website ‘didn’t have a chance in hell’ by Patrick Thibodeau.
From the post:
A majority of large IT projects fail to meet deadlines, are over budget and don’t make their users happy. Such is the case with Healthcare.gov.
The U.S. is now racing to fix Healthcare.gov, the Affordability Care Act (ACA) website that launched Oct 1, by bringing in new expertise to fix it.
Healthcare.gov’s problems include site availability due to excessive loads, incorrect data recording among other things.
President Barack Obama said Monday that there is “no excuse” for the problems at the site.
But his IT advisors shouldn’t be surprised — the success rate for large, multi-million dollar commercial and government IT projects is very low.
The Standish Group, which has a database of some 50,000 development projects, looked at the outcomes of multimillion dollar development projects and ran the numbers for Computerworld.
Of 3,555 projects from 2003 to 2012 that had labor costs of at least $10 million, only 6.4% were successful. The Standish data showed that 52% of the large projects were “challenged,” meaning they were over budget, behind schedule or didn’t meet user expectations. The remaining 41.4% were failures — they were either abandoned or started anew from scratch.
“They didn’t have a chance in hell,” said Jim Johnson, founder and chairman of Standish, of Healthcare.gov. “There was no way they were going to get this right – they only had a 6% chance,” he said.
There is one reason that wasn’t offered for the Healthcare.gov failure.
Let me illustrate that reason.
In the Computer World article I quoted above, the article mentions the FBI tanking the $170 million virtual case initiative.
Contractor: SAIC.
Just last month I saw this notice:
XXXXXXXXX, San Diego, Calif., was awarded a $35,883,761 cost-plus-incentive-fee contract for software engineering, hardware, integration, technical support, and training requirements of the Integrated Strategic Planning and Analysis Network targeting function, including the areas of National Target Base production and National Desired Ground Zero List development. Work is being performed at Offut Air Force Base, Neb., with an expected completion date of Sept. 30 2018. This contract was a competitive acquisition and two offers were received. No funds have been obligated at time of award. The 55th Contracting Squadron at Offut Air Force Base, Neb., is the contracting activity. (FA4600-13-D-0001) [From Defense News and Career Advice, September 19, 2013.]
Can you guess who the contractor is in that $35 million award?
If you guessed SAIC, you would be correct!
Where is the incentive to do a competent job on any contract?
If you fail on a government contract, you get to keep the money.
Not to mention that you are still in line for more $multi-million dollar contracts.
I’m not on that gravy train but I don’t think that is what bothers me.
Doing poor quality work, in software projects or anywhere else, diminishes all the practitioners in a particular profession.
The first step towards a solution is for government and industry to stop repeating business with software firms that fail.
If smaller firms can’t match the paperwork/supervision required by layers of your project management, that’s a clue you need to do internal house cleaning.
Remember the quote about what is defined by doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?
[…] If you know Sean, do you think he knows that only 6.4% of projects costing => $10 million succeed? (Healthcare.gov website ‘didn’t have a chance in hell’) […]
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