(2013-11-19) Shirky Healthcaregov Management Failure

Clay Shirky on the Healthcare.gov Project Failure as the responsibility of delusional Management. The idea that “Failure is not an option” is a fantasy version of how non-engineers should motivate engineers... Failure is always an option. Engineers work as hard as they do because they understand the risk of failure. And for anything it might have meant in its screenplay version, here that sentiment means the opposite; the unnamed executives were saying “Addressing the possibility of failure is not an option.”... The project’s managers weren’t avoiding those failures. They were saving them up... The problem with Healthcare.gov was not timeline or budget. The problem was that the site did not work, and the administration decided to launch it anyway. This is not just a hiring problem, or a procurement problem. This is a management problem, and a cultural problem.

Like all organizational models, WaterFall is mainly a theory of Collaboration. By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work.

It is hard for policy people to imagine that Healthcare.gov could have had a phased rollout, even while it is having one. At launch, on October 1, only a tiny fraction of potential users could actually try the service. They generated concrete errors. Those errors were handed to a team whose job was to improve the site, already public but only partially working. The resulting improvements are incremental, and put in place over a period of months. That is a phased rollout, just one conducted in the worst possible way.

If I had to design a litmus test for whether our political class grasps the internet, I would look for just one signal: Can anyone with authority over a new project articulate the Trade-Off between features, quality, and time?... Denying this tradeoff doesn’t prevent it from happening. If no one with authority over the project understands that, the tradeoff is likely to mean sacrificing quality by default. That just happened to this administration’s signature policy goal. It will happen again, as long politicians can be allowed to imagine that if you just plan hard enough, you can ignore reality.