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Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

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101–110 of 200 posts

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#101
post #96

[deleted]

I think the cake eaters cynically turned up the hate in 2008 and were rewarded with a landslide in the House in 2010. But in the long run, this was an unsustainable strategy to create a majority. The tea party was heavily funded. Occupy can't even hold a candle to it.

Providing only half the stimulus requested created a lot of misery while providing political cover of 'doing something'. Then the Republicans condemned Barry in 2012 for failing. This was known as the "bodies on the beach" strategy. If enough bodies piled up on the beach the electorate would vote out any sitting president.

People would need some 'other' to blame the status quo on.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#103
When I worked for the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, it was pounded into our heads all the time that there was no second chance. Everything we did would get one chance only.

For that reason, we had two Technical Rehearsals. The purpose was to test both our systems and our procedures, and identify how they could be refined for the real thing. It was someone's job to actually design a huge number of expected and unexpected issues so that tech operations teams at each venue could be tested as to their response. Issues ranged from broken printers to network meltdowns to broadcasting failures, etc. We had two Technical Rehearsals for hopefully obvious reasons. And before the Technical Rehearsals, we also had the test events (i.e. world class but lower profile sporting competitions held at the Olympic venues to see whether we fell short in putting up a world class competition event).

We also had Disaster Rehearsals to test our disaster recovery systems and procedures, though I wasn't personally involved in those. I did get a string of text messages when it was happening though. "Primary datacentre flooding, starting emergency processes to switch to secondary datacentre now." etc. Never mind that nobody could ever believe that the primary datacentre could get flooded in a million years. The attitude was that any disaster was possible, and we had to prepare for the impossible.

If you have one shot only, and that shot is important, you need to have a large process committed to making sure that one shot goes well. And that process needs to be managed by someone experienced in that type of thing.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#104
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now let's talk about Eric Holder, Obama, and a dead ATF agent. Something tells me you won't see it the same way.

There is a magnitude of difference between the two. When you run a top heavy campaign to get elected and a critical project fails miserably, that falls on you. When you preside over a government that consists of a large number of relatively autonomous agencies and departments, and something goes wrong deep inside one of them, that falls on the project managers and department heads. To provide some scale, Romney's cam…

Eric Holder is not one of 4 million. Eric Holder is a personal selection. It's not like it is a random failure in some lowly backwater office. It is a failure and a coverup going to the very top - to people personally appointed by the President. So if you think people are responsible for a mobile app done for them - then they should be responsible for the mess in their administration too.

And if we start counting how many projects endorsed, sponsored and initiated by the federal government failed recently, we could be here all night.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#105
post #2

From Slate back in July: an interesting background piece about the campaign's approach to staffing for data analysis. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/victory_lab/... What the debacle brings to mind is the consequences of putting "idea guys" in charge of software development when there is a hard deadline. "Orca had been conceived by two men—Romney's Director of Voter Contact Dan Centinello and the camp…

There's nothing wrong with web app over mobile app. Actually, recently here on HN was a number of articles about coming trend of switching from native apps to HTML5/web apps. It is a valid choice, especially when you need to communicate a lot of data, so you need network connection anyway.

Of course, that web app needs to be working - but the choice itself is completely fine. Given the circumstances, I would seriously consider going the same direction if I had to do an app like that.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Windows was a mistake, that's for sure. Good thing for Democrats they didn't know about the open source ushahidi platform.

You can fail on any platform with bad implementation and/or bad management and/or bad planning. That's the lesson here. (and at Twitter when they fail whaled for months on end with Rails - it wasn't Rails fault - it was the application of Rails in too high a volume deployment)

Obviously, Dick Costolo is unfit to be the president. Will have to write it down in case he decides to run.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#107

The campaign could not manage launching a web app and they wanted to run the entire USA !?!?!?!

They already do. Federal government regularly fails spectacularly and it regularly costs us taxpayers billions. And so do local, state, municipal, etc. governments. Presenting it as if this is some unheard of failure that disqualifies everybody involved including the candidate is silly. A lot of successful websites failed, many multiple times and for prolonged period, despite employing top talent and spending millions on them. Failure is always an option.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#108
post #43

>To build Orca, the Romney campaign turned to Microsoft and an unnamed application consulting firm. Lawsuit incoming in 3...2...1... I can't imagine the billionaires who funded the campaign and the various Super PACs are going to be pleased to find out Romney likely lost because of a failed GOTV effort.

It's a stretch to think that a functioning mobile app on election day would have made the difference between Romney winning and losing. The election wasn't really that close. And I say that as someone who voted for him.

[deleted]

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#109
post #9

Zero training? A single web server? No end users even touching the system till it's time for mission critical use? No frigging redirect of http->https? And it looks like, as has happened more than once in my professional life, people outside of the management structure saw possible risks and were blown off by those in charge. Even if you supported Romney, this has to give you some pause about the man's management ski…

It would give me more pause if Mitt Romney were involved personally in this sort of a project.

If there is anything a president's job isn't, it is to micromanage.

Re: Inside Team Romney’s whale of an IT meltdown

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't hire people with adequate management skills to assess risk and take proactive steps to mitigate problems before they become dangerous to the mission, that's a failure at the highest level. Someone should've see this coming, or Romney clearly doesn't know how to delegate responsibility well.

Now let's talk about Eric Holder, Obama, and a dead ATF agent. Something tells me you won't see it the same way.

Counter to the typical view of F&F:

http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/06/27/fast-and-fu...

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