Item — HN Reader

Hey HN! I worked on the "tech surge" to save healthcare.gov, and as many of you have noticed, this report gets everything backwards. A 96-hour training course would not have saved healthcare.gov, and you can't fix bureaucracy with more bureaucracy.

If you want to understand what went wrong on healthcare.gov and how it was fixed, Mikey Dickerson's talk here is the closest thing we have to a postmortem:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0albm_hhQzM

healthcare.gov has also given rise to new initiatives to fix the way the government writes software. Within the government, there is the US Digital Service, 18F, and the Presidential Innovation Fellows:

  https://medium.com/@USDigitalService/an-improbable-public-interest-start-up-6f9a54712411

  18f.gsa.gov

  http://www.jasonshen.com/2015/when-did-you-do-your-tour-of-duty/

  http://www.jasonshen.com/2014/everything-wanted-know-presidential-innovation-fellowship-afraid-ask/

There are also new types of government contractors, including Nava and Ad Hoc LLC:

  http://www.fastcodesign.com/welcome.html?destination=http://www.fastcodesign.com/3047856/innovation-by-design/meet-nava-a-startup-that-wants-to-fix-the-governments-crappy-design

  http://adhocteam.us/

4 comments

This is one of many audits conducted as part of the IG's review of the healthcare.gov rollout. The purpose of this audit was to determine if existing rules regarding contract management were followed.

It in no way claims that taking a 96 hour training course would have fixed the rollout of healthcare.gov or even that the contract management failings were the primary reason for the failure of the rollout.

The other reports suffer from the same problem -- they're focused on whether paperwork was filled out correctly. That's not what killed the project. To the extent these reports are read, I think they lead people to focus on the wrong things.

I think the IG reports would be much better if they just did the following: interview the engineers who worked on the original version. Ask them what the problems were. Then, interview the engineers (from both the "tech surge" and the contractors) who lived through the process of getting the site working. Ask them what changed. Write those things down.

I hate to say that the (lousy) article claims exactly what you say the audit doesn't claim. It specifically describes "how shoddy oversight by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which manages federal health programs including Obamacare, contributed to the website’s early struggles."

"contributed to" ≠ "caused"

Please forgive the directness, but I need to ask you this because I have noticed a pattern. Whenever HealthCare.gov gets mentioned, there's always the most over-the-top enthusiasm for how it was such a great turnaround.

I've worked with dozens of large projects -- including ones that were turned around -- and this is new to me.

The only thing new I can see here is the political environment around the healthcare law. Hopefully I am wrong.

So when the Republicans take control over the executive branch, this time or whenever in the future, are we going to keep hearing such great boosterism? The Republicans decide to automate voter identification and the project goes south, will we see such great turnaround stories? It would be very comforting to know that the new Digital Service and the influx of enthusiasm is not limited to one party or large government project. Some assurance would be most appreciated.

"So when the Republicans take control over the executive branch... are we going to keep hearing such great boosterism?"

WHy are you asking him? I don't think anyone knows the answer to this. Obviously the major factor would be whether the next president (be they Republican or Democrat) decide to continue support for these kinds of teams, both in terms of funding and autonomy to do their job. This seems like something we should be asking the candidates and their parties about.

Because the topic of this thread is the large scale system of project delivery and changes to it. The poster made some sweeping statements about how the article was not accurate and provided great reference material to what he considered more relevant material.

Given the topic of how these large systems operate and could be improved, and given the poster's claims to have special insight, seemed reasonable to me to continue the dialog. After all, this was an example of behavior associated with the topic at hand.

And my question was about enthusiasm and public support. Why would presidential candidates have anything to do with this? If it is partisan, then my question has been answered.

The US Digital Service started with healthcare.gov, but nowadays they work across the government on projects that matter to people all over the political spectrum: VA, immigration, department of education, and more.

That said, I have no way to predict who the Republican nominee will be or what they'll do. I think the impact of USDS relative to its budget is huge, and I'd like to believe making the government competent at writing software is a bipartisan issue, so I would hope this initiative crosses over into the next administration, whoever it is.

Right now, I think everybody at USDS is just focused on getting results over the next 18 months.

I wonder how this affects the many IT companies which rely solely on government contracts. I looked for some of smaller the companies that are on the list of the report. There was one which has its "HQ" in a single family house. This whole business sector looks shady and more like scheme to earn easy tax payer money through government contracts. Is there some form of götterdämmerung for these companies or are they worked with in order to improve?

I'm a college student, how do I get into doing the work that you did? I'd love to spend some time on the side helping out my country.

I'd recommend either Nava (navahq.com) or the USDS reserves (https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-ser...).