Government is just too big. With in house work you get people that don't care. It's a monopoly, and it works the way all monopolies do. With contracted work you get fraud, and raped with "extras".
I certainly hope the get it fixed. However, I always wonder if the government is really worse than private industry. There are some huge boners pulled by corporations that never get made public, whereas government work is very open to the public.
About 30 years ago I worked for a health insurance company that signed a big contract with a very large city that added like a million subscribers. What a disaster. People couldn't get thru on the phones for months and so many wrote letters. Since there were so many letters we fell 3 months behind on them. So we just started tossing out letters older than 2 months under the assumption that the people must have gotten their problems solved already since so much time had passed!
Lets not forget that the Medicare Drug plan, Part D, had the same problems when it started a few years back and they have it working great now.
The talent of the resources and whether they are in-house or not is really not the issue here. Bill Gates himself could have been the project manager for the Healthcare exchanges and it wouldn't have mattered. If you don't have executive direction in place then nothing else matters, period. The incompetents here weren't the developers, it was the political hacks who were still arguing about things as simple as site login rules *days before go-live*. But no doubt the special deputy assistant secretary of IT fuckups will probably get promoted after this debacle with his performance review saying "instituted good Agile development principles in the Obamacare system project."
When it comes down to it, this website was a nearly impossible thing to get right. Getting 50 states and their random systems to all work flawlessly with this one main site, with all of the rules and regulations that surround government websites and privacy - good luck.
Federal officials did not permit testing of the Obamacare healthcare.gov website or issue final system requirements until four to six days before its Oct. 1 launch, according to an individual with direct knowledge of the project.
Actually Bill Gates could have fixed it as a project manager.
Do you know how many times my "customers" said, "well, we don't like that and we want this with no slippage of schedule"?
If you cannot articulate why your program cannot overcome the natural laws of physics then you aren't the right program or project manager.
Why were they changing the requirements at the last second? Because no one told them it wasn't going to happen in the days and months leading up to it.
If you let the customer run crazy on you in the beginning, they will think they can do whatever they want. And as someone who executes software development efforts using SCRUM, I know all too well that some people think Agile means no requirements or that you can change things at any moment and get exactly what you want.
Without strong leadership and experience at the PM level, you are really fucked. So I do not blame the contracting companies as they are in business to make money. The gov't side was not in order. And the reason is that you don't have anyone on the gov't side that had ever delivered software into production is my bet.
That's awesome!
I am really glad it helped you and I'm also glad you shared. You are the first person I've heard from that this has actually helped. In my mind its all just a scam because I don't know of anyone that has benefited from it. Now I do.
Thanks man. You are in my prayers every day.
This is an issue with LOT of companies/industries. Heck, we're using lot of systems at work that rely on specific versions of IE and Java. IE6, and some version of Java from that era. You upgrade one of those and it breaks everything.
LOL I see CGI was mentioned. Guess what, they're the ones who code our systems too. HAHAHAHAHA. They overcharge for everything too, a simple change in a program is 10's of thousands of dollars. I don't understand why companies outsource programming, it would be much better to make it an IT function, or for a bigger company have a few dedicated programmers.
Lovely so they gave jobs to non US citizens and apparently spent more than the average for something like this? This is what really burns me. Why don't they give these jobs to US citizens, and their companies?
+1Government contracts should go to foreign companies as an absolute last resort, even if it costs more to do it in-country. It's a matter of sovereignty, and taking care of your people first.
Lovely so they gave jobs to non US citizens and apparently spent more than the average for something like this? This is what really burns me. Why don't they give these jobs to US citizens, and their companies?
Some things shouldn't be put up for bid, or should at least have severe restrictions on who can take part. Google, Amazon, and facebook are full of talent that can keep a huge machine working. This would have been a walk in the park for them.
Government contracts should go to foreign companies as an absolute last resort, even if it costs more to do it in-country. It's a matter of sovereignty, and taking care of your people first.
Great, so it would have cost $900 million and be just as broken instead.
What would you prefer, going with a contractor who happens to be foreign and has built something like this before, or going with locals who have absolutely no inkling of what's involved? If your fiduciary duty is to minimize unnecessary costs to your organization and you picked option B, you should be terminated.
I certainly hope the get it fixed. However, I always wonder if the government is really worse than private industry. There are some huge boners pulled by corporations that never get made public, whereas government work is very open to the public.
About 30 years ago I worked for a health insurance company that signed a big contract with a very large city that added like a million subscribers. What a disaster. People couldn't get thru on the phones for months and so many wrote letters. Since there were so many letters we fell 3 months behind on them. So we just started tossing out letters older than 2 months under the assumption that the people must have gotten their problems solved already since so much time had passed!
Lets not forget that the Medicare Drug plan, Part D, had the same problems when it started a few years back and they have it working great now.
Honestly, in your place, I'd write the letter to your superior CC'ed to your CEO, CFO, state representative and anyone else you could possibly write and take that resignation. Doing nothing out of fear for your job isn't exactly helping anyone other than yourself.
Great, so it would have cost $900 million and be just as broken instead.
What would you prefer, going with a contractor who happens to be foreign and has built something like this before, or going with locals who have absolutely no inkling of what's involved? If your fiduciary duty is to minimize unnecessary costs to your organization and you picked option B, you should resign or be terminated.
The ACA website DID NOT cost 600 million dollars.
The site quoting that number intentionally mislead readers and as other sites picked up on that, it spread without anyone checking the facts. This story is most likely a plant from an agency under contract from the GOP or Tea Party.
They took all the government contracts awarded to CGI Group Inc. and tried to claim its only for the website. The company in question has many contracts with the US government and has been the goto company for projects for years. The 600mil figure is based on 115 transactions over the past 7 years.
The actual total cost for ACA website is about 90 million. This covered a 3 year project that interfaces with several systems across the states and agencies and has the added pressure of lots of regulations and administrative overhead found in Government projects.
I haven't seen the infrastructure\or code samples but I would fully expect it not be the latest and greatest stuff. Code quality....well when you outsource to an outsourcer over a multiple year project and you have whittled your in house support staff down to nothing (see Codewiz's post)
The ACA website DID NOT cost 600 million dollars.
The site quoting that number intentionally mislead readers and as other sites picked up on that, it spread without anyone checking the facts. This story is most likely a plant from an agency under contract from the GOP or Tea Party.
They took all the government contracts awarded to CGI Group Inc. and tried to claim its only for the website. The company in question has many contracts with the US government and has been the goto company for projects for years. The 600mil figure is based on 115 transactions over the past 7 years.
The actual total cost for ACA website is about 90 million. This covered a 3 year project that interfaces with several systems across the states and agencies and has the added pressure of lots of regulations and administrative overhead found in Government projects.
I haven't seen the infrastructure\or code samples but I would fully expect it not be the latest and greatest stuff. Code quality....well when you outsource to an outsourcer over a multiple year project and you have whittled your in house support staff down to nothing (see Codewiz's post)
The ACA website DID NOT cost 600 million dollars.
The site quoting that number intentionally mislead readers and as other sites picked up on that, it spread without anyone checking the facts. This story is most likely a plant from an agency under contract from the GOP or Tea Party.
They took all the government contracts awarded to CGI Group Inc. and tried to claim its only for the website. The company in question has many contracts with the US government and has been the goto company for projects for years. The 600mil figure is based on 115 transactions over the past 7 years.
The actual total cost for ACA website is about 90 million. This covered a 3 year project that interfaces with several systems across the states and agencies and has the added pressure of lots of regulations and administrative overhead found in Government projects.
I haven't seen the infrastructure\or code samples but I would fully expect it not be the latest and greatest stuff. Code quality....well when you outsource to an outsourcer over a multiple year project and you have whittled your in house support staff down to nothing (see Codewiz's post)
The exact cost to build Healthcare.gov and its related systems is difficult to determine due to the expansive nature of the project and the murky details in federal budgets. But based on the figures and details available, here is my best estimate of what this flawed system has cost us: The most clear data comes from a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report from June (pdf), which states that the U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) spent almost $394 million from fiscal year 2010 through March 2013 through contracts to build the federally facilitated exchanges (FFEs) the complex system that includes Healthcare.gov as well as certain state-based exchanges the data hub, and other expenditures related to the Obamacare exchange system. While GAO states that the highest volume of that $394 million was related to the development of information technology systems, a more detailed look at that cost shows that a portion that $394 million was spent on things like call centers and collection services. Take that out, and youre left with roughly $363 million spent on technology-related costs to the healthcare exchanges the bulk of which ($88 million) went to CGI Federal, the company awarded a $93.7 million contract to build Healthcare.gov and other technology portions of the FFEs.
Right, or the USA gov could have done their research
lx and I see these kinds of things pretty much the same.
Its the US citizens' money. It should be put back into our struggling economy if at all possible. Not just with this, but with all things the government spends money on. I personally don't think the federal government should be able to send a penny to a foreign company without a direct vote from Congress. But that's just me.
Right, or the USA gov could have done their research to determine why the Canadian government fired CGI Group for the mismanagement of the Canadian healthcare website.
Great, so it would have cost $900 million and be just as broken instead.
What would you prefer, going with a contractor who happens to be foreign and has built something like this before, or going with locals who have absolutely no inkling of what's involved? If your fiduciary duty is to minimize unnecessary costs to your organization and you picked option B, you should resign or be terminated.