*** Updated: The IRS system to support Obamacare/ACA does work. As a result of which we learn of yet another hole in Heathcare.gov.
Some day the political furor over the introduction of government-run health care will simmer down, and it will either start working or we will be stuck with it anyway (since that's the way government works). At that point, academe will be free to climb down from its partisan cheerleading role and do some actual research into the issues that surface every month or so [or perhaps into the reasons why the issues do not surface until then], at which point Healthcare.gov will be included in every textbook as the defining case study on governance issues. Meanwhile, you can look into governance issues via this blog ;-) ***
In "The Mythical Man-Month", Fred Brooks posited what has come to be known as "Brooks' Law": adding resources to a late project simply makes it later. The reasoning is that the existing team now has to stop much of what it was doing to explain what is going on to the newbies rather than getting on with the actions that they already know they need to take.
The Affordable Care Act (better known as Obamacare) website project has recently undertaken what it calls a "surge" -- somewhat ironic, considering Obama's opposition to the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan -- to correct the problems in the ACA healthcare website and enrollment process.
At first sight this would appear to be an interesting and very public case study in whether Brooks' Law can be overcome. But Brooks' Law talks about technical resources, and it does not appear that the repair concept is about adding any significant numbers of contractors (i.e. developers or testers). On the contrary, the contractors (in a display that was certainly unique in my experience) threw their contract-holders under the bus and claimed that the only resource lacking was project management skills on the part of the government. Indeed, the primary change appears to have been the assignment of OMB Deputy Director Jeff Zients to give the matter his attention. At least he has evidently taken one of the elementary steps of project management, which is to hold a review to determine what the plan actually is, what the status is, and what the issues are. Elementary, perhaps, but we are to gather that this is concept is entirely novel for this program.
So it would seem that HHS and OMB have developed an extension to Brooks' Law - we can call it the Zients Law: "while the addition of resources could delay a project, bringing a project manager on board may well be a necessary condition of getting a project back under control."
*** Update: Within days, Zients announced that the web site would achieve full operating capability in 30 days, a breath-takingly remarkable assertion. Even simple things in government take more than 30 days. At the end of 30 days there was no announcement of anything: the manual enrollment process continued, and Zients slunk back to OMB with no fanfare. In January 2014 the enrolment figures zoomed -- as the result of a back-end process moving millions of people from Medicaid to ACA.
To be fair, Zients, or somebody, did put a lot of project management things into place. A new contractor was brought on board at the turn of the year and they must have done a bang-up job because within weeks (March), more or less in the nick of time to meet the enrollment deadline, the website apparently handled several million last-minute on-line enrollments, thereby proving both the financial viability of the program itself and of course the technical viability of the website ***
I'll go out on a limb here and say that if (as claimed) senior executives and appointees never inquired into the status of this administration's number one domestic policy initiative, then they are so incompetent as to deserve removal for that. On the other hand, if the project managers at any level were fully aware of the issues and chose not to pass that information up the chain, or worse to alter it, then they need to be terminated - not "allowed to retire", but terminated without future pensions and be darned glad that they are not being subjected to recoupment of the cost of this botched effort.
*** Update: CIOs are required to certify the condition of their major investments on the Federal IT Dashboard. It's managed by OMB -- which is part of the Executive Office of the President -- and it's quite a big deal. Lateness is not tolerated. Except, apparently, sometimes. The Dashboard, which is publicly available -- usually -- reveals that in January 2013 the project was suddenly listed as RED because -- well, because it wasn't passing planned tests. The following month it went back to green. In August 2013 (right about the time that the September rollout issues with Healthcare.gov HAD to have become obvious to anybody working on it) the ENTIRE Federal dashboard reporting process simply stopped. Coincidence? Well, I guess you can't show a RED on a dashboard that isn't being updated, now can you? Maybe Zients, as the OMB Deputy Director, knows how that happened. Anyway in April the data stream started back up again.
So who's been fired? Well, nobody. A couple of people have been retired in regular order and Secretary Sebelius moved on amid the usual political and media swooning about her greatness. The contractor was eventually replaced by another based on its track record of having done a similar project for one of the states (well, there's a good idea -- except that later it transpired that the state's exchange wasn't doing so well either). And 6 months later we learn that system has been making millions of dollars of erroneous payments of subsidies. It is not the system's fault that the subsidies themselves are also coming under scrutiny as to whether they are legal at all How do we know any of this? Because the IRS system supporting ACA, which does work, is finding discrepancies in tax returns between the filer's incomes, the subsidies to which they are entitled, and the subsidies they have been getting. So the technical solution is not impossible to attain; the IRS has already figured it out. ***
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