Healthcare.gov Website Failure
Many considered the October 2013 healthcare.gov launch a failure. Designed as an online market place, healthcare.gov allowed users to shop for and compare healthcare policies. Initialed in December 2011, the 55 contractors tasked with building the system had only 22 months until the October 1, 2013 launch date. There are several factors that contributed to the failed launch. A contributing factor to its failure was the sheer complexity of the project. In addition to being technically complex with multiple disparate data sources, the project suffered from a large stakeholder population as well as late and ever-changing project specifications. The political environment and ineffective project management also significantly impacted the initial launch.
The learning objectives of this critical incident are for students to:
- Analyze the factors that lead to complexity and likelihood of failed implementation in
large scale Government to Constituent (G2C) system development and acquisition. - Synthesize approaches to overcome these factors and increase the likelihood of success.
- Evaluate system testing approaches for a large scale web-based system.
- Evaluate project managers’ response to testing results and the lessons leaders can learn
about system implementation from this incident.