Healthcare gov project management case study

BBA 3626, Project Management Overview 1

Course Learning Outcomes for Unit I Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to:

1. Identify project management concepts.

Reading Assignment Chapter 1: Introduction to Project Management, pp. 2-19, and 23

Unit Lesson Unit I covers basic project management concepts. This summary is going to emphasize some major project failures. Let’s start out with a quote that relates to this subject by Albert Einstein, “Insanity: doing the same thing over again and expecting different results” (Nelson, 2007, p. 1). One of the project failures of 2014 was the healthcare.gov failure which caused a major crisis for this mandated program. This failure was due to an over aggressive schedule and not meeting the customer needs. Too many people trying to get access to a site that could not handle the capacity helped the failure of heathcare.gov. It appears that possibly the site was not tested to see if the capacity was correct or could handle the load. The healthcare.gov site was not ready to go when it went into implementation. According to Matthew Heusser (2013), this was “the most public software project failure of the decade” (para. 2). Healthcare.gov used the agile approach to software development in the terms of a sprint. A sprint is a session every two weeks where the team goes over their progress and shows what works or does not work. Then the team plans what they will do next. It is a storyboard type of development that is the new buzz word for software development. Basically, each sprint is an iteration or a completed chunk of software development to be designed. The theory is that the software code is designed, coded, and fully tested from end-to-end before moving on to the next chunk. The development may have been going along fine but the system was not ready to be fully implemented as a finished product. The system was not tested to its capacity if at all. The project’s failure was monumental and systemic. Multiple failures occurred on multiple levels, but no one really knows exactly what happened. Healthcare.gov was only in the beta testing phase which means it was not ready for production (Heusser, 2013). Media sites such as the New Yorker, Washington Post, and MedCity News claimed healthcare.gov failed because agile development was not utilized. Unfortunately, that was false because healthcare.gov’s front-end GUI and back-end data services hub were utilizing agile processes. Evidence clearly showed that sprints, user stories, and incremental testing were occurring during the development process. Possibly in this case, requirements decomposition should have been used instead of user stories. A good design document may have helped this project be successful. There is one thing for certain, bad project management skills were alive and well in this project (Daconta, 2013). Now, let’s go back in time to the 1990s and discuss another huge project failure. The Denver Airport Baggage System project in the 1990s was a disaster. Dysfunctional decision making aided in the demise of this project. The world’s largest automated airport baggage handling system was a project gone wrong. The goal of the project was to have a turnaround time of about 30 minutes once the plane landed. Denver needed a larger airport so this plan was within the larger airport plan. The plan became too complex and the opening of the airport added an additional 16 months. The delay cost the city of Denver $1.1 million per day throughout the delay. Even when the airport finally did open, the baggage system was not at full capacity. Only a single concourse, with a single airline, and for outbound traffic only worked on the first day of opening. All three

UNIT I STUDY GUIDE

An Introduction to Project Management

BBA 3626, Project Management Overview 2

UNIT x STUDY GUIDE

Title

concourses should have been an integrated system. This project was worked on another 10 years and it never worked well. The project was terminated in 2005 (Calleam Consulting, 2008). Some of the failures of this Denver project included an underestimate of the complexity involved, changes in strategy, decision to proceed, schedule, scope, budget constraints, acceptance of change requests, design of the physical building structure, and the decision to seek a different path. This project was compounded by so many project failure issues that it never recovered. Other failure points included risk management failures when an electrical system suffered from a power surge that crashed the system before the required filters to prevent this were installed. If the team had focused on risk management procedures, this failure would have been avoided. Also, one of the key leaders passed away and a new sponsor took over who lacked the knowledge to understand the system. The system was plagued with architectural and design issues because the system had over 100 individual PCs networked together. Failure of one PC could result in an outage since no automatic backups for failed components were considered. The PCs were distributed all over the airport causing even more problems when a problem arose. The system was unable to detect jams when they occurred and suitcases just kept piling up. Schedule pressure may have been a factor for the design problems. The system was not fault tolerant in any aspect and was a total failure. Knowledge and expertise played a key role in the failure of this project. The leaders did not have the expertise to deal with such a sophisticated automated baggage system which was new at the time (Calleam Consulting, 2008). Projects fail for many reasons such as: little or no support from senior management, absence of user participation throughout the project, poorly or ill-defined scope, inadequate project leadership, lack of good requirements, no definitive methodology, unrealistic marketing deadlines versus technology implementation requirements, no communication, no formal change or configuration control management, inadequate quality assurance verification and validation, lack of good testing techniques or none at all, lack of knowledge transfer, inexperienced IT professionals, and employee and experienced IT professionals burn out. Both of these projects discussed suffered from multiple reasons listed above. Throughout this course, you will learn how to manage a project effectively in order to avoid becoming a statistic as listed in the failed projects of this unit summary.

References Calleam Consulting. (2008). Case study- Denver International Airport baggage handling system: An

illustration of ineffectual decision making. Retrieved from http://calleam.com/WTPF/wp- content/uploads/articles/DIABaggage.pdf

Daconta, M. C. (2013). Media got it wrong: Healthcare.gov failed despite agile practice. GCN. Retrieved from

http://gcn.com/blogs/reality-check/2013/11/healthcare-agile.aspx Heusser, M. (2013). 6 software development lessons learned from Healthcare.gov’s failed launch. Retrieved

from http://www.cio.com/article/2380827/developer/6-software-development-lessons-from-healthcare- gov-s-failed-launch.html

Nelson, R. (2007). IT project management: Infamous failures, classic mistakes, and best practices. MIS

Quarterly Executive, 6(2).

Suggested Reading Nelson, R. (2007). IT project management: Infamous failures, classic mistakes, and best practices. MIS