Health Care Portal: No amount of great Project Management could save this project

I am heading to Philidephia to go to a promising summit of Digital Project Managers. I am excite at meeting other PM professionals and expect I have much to learn.

While I was getting ready I cruised the NY Times and read the article about the failure of the Health Exchange Portals.

The tone of the article is trying to be even handed about the failures, but all I see are the elements of a nightmare project which was designed to fail.

Let me start by saying that I have NO knowledge other than what is reported in this article. I don't know anyone who has or is working on the sites.

No capacity to bend:
One thing I look for in a project is where things can bend.  Is it the date? or the money? or the requirements?  This one looks like all three were fixed.  Oct 1 was the president's promise, it's the government, so the money is non-negotiable and apparently the requirements were fixed too. 

Oh and "failure is not an option".  When I have heard that phrase in the past it's was practically a promise that it is going to fail.   Saying "failure is not an option" means that you have no plan on how to fail gracefully. 

Requirements delivered late:
There is some room to breathe if you start early and get some things done even when the client is wishy washy about how things will work.  When the client doesn't know what they want and then pushes the deadline in delivering the requirements, there goes the team's ability to work smartly.

Complicated system:
Looking at the graphic, the system they were building was wildly complicated.  Verification from social security, VA and many other government organizations.  I am guessing they didn't all have super great APIs which were easy to access and use.  This is a huge issue.

Many, many parties to coordinate:
55 contractors!  Holy cow!  No wonder they are all saying "my stuff works, not it!"

Stakeholder Bombs:
I have seen last minute "requirements" added to the success criteria from busy executives who want to make sure one more thing is highlighted or maybe even that they put their mark on it.  I have never had stakeholders who are actively working against the product and hoping to make it fail.  I am sure there were some doozy requirements in there that were impossible to accomplish, but required tact and political navigation to even avoid.

Inexperienced General Contractor:
Like anything that is hard, complicated, and high stakes you want to have the best possible group coordinating all of these moving parts.  So they picked a group who had no experience in large system delivery.


Given these project parameters, I am SURE that the team involved in this project are superheroes who performed real miracles to get a system up at all by Oct 1.  More miracles will be performed in the next few weeks to recover and get it going, and I feel confident they will given the incredible smarts, tenacity and commitment I see in the software industry.