Tension and Flaws Before Health Website Crash
As a result, the president’s signature initiative was effectively left under the day-to-day management of Henry Chao, a 19-year veteran of the Medicare agency with little clout and little formal background in computer science.
Mr. Chao had to consult with senior department officials and the White House, and was unable to make many decisions on his own. “Nothing was decided without a conversation there,” said one agency official involved in the project, referring to the constant White House demands for oversight. On behalf of Mr. Chao, the Medicare agency declined to comment.
Sixteen companies were prequalified to bid on the project, according to administration officials. CGI was picked as the prime contractor over three other bidders: IBM, QSSI and Computer Sciences Corporation. But the Medicare agency reserved the role of general contractor, or system integrator, for itself, even though it lacked the necessary in-house software engineering resources to handle such a task.
A pattern of ever-shifting requirements persisted throughout the project, including the administration’s decision late last year to try to redesign the site’s appearance and content to make it more informative to consumers, according to many specialists involved. The administration also decided to reconfigure it as a national site, instead of one where each state had its own front page, after many states decided not to open their own exchanges.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/23/us/politics/tension-and-woes-before-health-website-crash.html
Note to aspiring IT project managers: If you are in a situation where you explain to the marketing types the cost and schedule risks of their requested changes, and if they then say "it has to be the way we described because we are marketing and we get to decide", run away and look for another job.
