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Obama's Trauma Team: Inside the Nightmare Launch of HealthCare.Gov

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11–20 of 259 posts

Re: Obama's Trauma Team: Inside the Nightmare Launch of HealthCare.Gov

#11
>How an unlikely group of high-tech wizards revived Obama's troubled HealthCare.gov website

How? With another 14 million dollars... that is how. You can do a lot of things with 14 million dollars, this is not especially true when you are talking about the govt spending this kind of money, but still - it is not pocket change to the average company.

http://www.nextgov.com/cloud-computing/2014/02/cost-obamacar...

Re: Obama's Trauma Team: Inside the Nightmare Launch of HealthCare.Gov

#12
post #10

Dickerson rules: "Rule 1: "The war room and the meetings are for solving problems. There are plenty of other venues where people devote their creative energies to shifting blame." Rule 2: "The ones who should be doing the talking are the people who know the most about an issue, not the ones with the highest rank. If anyone finds themselves sitting passively while managers and executives talk over them with less accur…

This! Rule 2.

I sit in meetings weekly with mangers discussing issues that I know about the most but I can never get them to hear me out.

Re: Obama's Trauma Team: Inside the Nightmare Launch of HealthCare.Gov

#13

One question I have - were the high-tech wizards paid standard gsa rates? https://www.gsaadvantage.gov/ref_text/GS35F5457H/0LUS2P.2NVK... Page 25. Top developer rate for 2014 is $99/hr which requires 10 years of experience.

Would explain a lot if so. Any developer you can get for that rate who has been working for 10 years likely does not have 10 years of experience, but 1 year of experience repeated 10 times.

Re: Obama's Trauma Team: Inside the Nightmare Launch of HealthCare.Gov

#14
post #10

Dickerson rules: "Rule 1: "The war room and the meetings are for solving problems. There are plenty of other venues where people devote their creative energies to shifting blame." Rule 2: "The ones who should be doing the talking are the people who know the most about an issue, not the ones with the highest rank. If anyone finds themselves sitting passively while managers and executives talk over them with less accur…

Rule #1: Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the war room!

Re: Obama's Trauma Team: Inside the Nightmare Launch of HealthCare.Gov

#17
post #14
post #10

Dickerson rules: "Rule 1: "The war room and the meetings are for solving problems. There are plenty of other venues where people devote their creative energies to shifting blame." Rule 2: "The ones who should be doing the talking are the people who know the most about an issue, not the ones with the highest rank. If anyone finds themselves sitting passively while managers and executives talk over them with less accur…

Rule #1: Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the war room!

I wonder how many readers will recognize this famous quotation and its source.

(long pause ...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove

Re: Obama's Trauma Team: Inside the Nightmare Launch of HealthCare.Gov

#18
Wow! They weren't even caching database calls:

HealthCare.gov had been constructed so that every time a user had to get information from the website's vast database, the website had to make what's called a query into that database. Well-constructed, high-volume sites, especially e-commerce sites, will instead store or assemble the most frequently accessed information in a layer above the entire database, called a cache.

It also struck me as a little funny that Time had to define the term 'cache'. Even my mom (74 years old) has some idea what a cache is (browser cache).

Re: Obama's Trauma Team: Inside the Nightmare Launch of HealthCare.Gov

#20
But one lesson of the fall and rise of HealthCare.gov has to be that the practice of awarding high-tech, high-stakes contracts to companies whose primary skill seems to be getting those contracts rather than delivering on them has to change.

If this happens the entire contracting landscape of DC would change dramatically.

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