....And no one noticed until it was too late. Steven Brill's recent cover story in Time about how a handful of Silicon
Valley engineers and experts resurrected HealthCare.gov from technical and political disaster should be a warning to politicians and policy experts everywhere: No longer can the government continue to use traditional development and contracting methods without looking incompetent. Citizens use software everyday that delights them. They now expect websites to be intuitive, well-designed and reliable.
Make work visible!
One of the things that shocked [the rescue] team most–”among many jaw-dropping aspects of what we found,” as one put it–was that the people running HealthCare.gov had no “dashboard,” no quick way for engineers to measure what was going on at the website, such as how many people were using it, what the response times were for various click-throughs and where traffic was getting tied up. So late into the night of Oct. 18, [the team] spent about five hours coding and putting up a dashboard.
Stand-ups Work
It was in . . . a nondescript office park in Columbia, Md.–lined with giant Samsung TV monitors showing the various dashboard readings and graphs–that Barack Obama’s health care website was saved. What saved it were stand-ups.. . . The stand-up culture–identify problem, solve problem, try again–was typical of the rescue squad’s ethic.
Government contracting is broken:
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. “It was only when they were desperate that they turned to us,” says [team member] Mickey Dickerson. “I have no history in government contracting and no future in it … I don’t wear a suit and tie … They have no use for someone who looks and dresses like me. Maybe this will be a lesson for them. Maybe that will change.”
Things are changing at least at the Department of Defense. It is now the law that all DoD software contracts must be Agile. Many in Washington are still trying to figure out what exactly that means but it is a start. Scrum Inc. is also seeing a rush of training requests from big government defense contractors looking to get their teams trained in Scrum.
In April we're giving an on-line course that focuses on Scrum, Agile, and the DoD. We'll be talking about the latest on how the Department is changing its rules to take advantage of Scrum's ability to deliver products faster, better, and more responsive to change. Which if you're providing tools to someone in combat, is critical.
-- Joel Riddle
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